Pete Hegseth doesn’t understand the biggest advantage of the military he runs.

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When I was in Iraq, on patrol and during emergency responder training, I was given the option of picking my own radio call sign. I always picked Sushi. I did this because it was one of my favorite cuisines, because I thought it was funny, and most of all, because I was deliberately avoiding the call signs that some others would pick, words like Shadow, or Lightning, or Speartip.

Nobody ever said anything out loud, but plenty of us would roll our eyes and make eye contact with one another, silently shaking our heads when we heard such self-consciously macho terms come across the radio. This was long before the term “cringe” was a thing, but it could have easily been applied.

There’s a scene in the 1981 Bill Murray film Stripes where a solider introduces himself to his colleagues as “Psycho,” though his real name is Francis. He goes on to threaten to kill them if they ever call him by his real name, touch his stuff, or touch him. At the end of his litany, the sergeant, beyond unimpressed, directs him to “lighten up, Francis.”

The scene captures the same sense of cringe that I felt whenever I heard a radio call sign that broadcast the user’s insecurity to everyone listening. It flew in the face of the mantra of the “quiet professional” that suffused military culture, a kind of sober maturity that was critical to judicious use of deadly force. This description encapsulates the real warrior ethos: Humble, quiet, just doing a job. Quiet professionals understand that violence is risky and costly, and use it only as a last resort. Bragging, threatening, and posturing are all frowned upon. The merits of this culture are obvious. It is designed to weed out the insecure and trigger-happy, the reckless hotheads with something to prove.

This culture is at the heart of a competent military, and indeed is essential to the morale and cohesion that makes the American armed forces the envy of the world. Voices from across the military tout humble, dignified professionalism as essential to morale and project confidence from leadership down through the ranks. That morale and confidence are critical to operational performance.

That’s why it is particularly concerning to see the current leadership throwing these ideas in the trash and embracing the ethic of Francis, raising something akin to a constant war cry. Mired in a war he chose and finds himself unable to exit, Donald Trump agreed to suspend his threats to attack civilian targets in Iran for two weeks. It’s the latest in a wave of chaotic and humiliating reversals for American global power over the past month, and with the Iranian regime stubbornly clinging to power, it’s unclear what the way out of this will be.

But even more overtly, the quiet professional has been replaced with the saber-rattling bully. Our armed forces are now helmed by a secretary of defense whose ideology has directly framed American military power in the term of a “crusade.” He exemplifies this ethos with his pride in his Jerusalem cross tattoo, and his tattoo of the Latin Deus Vult (“God wills it”), both symbols of Crusader power that have no place in our military. This is coupled with Trump’s promises to “bomb them into the Stone Ages, where they belong,” and otherwise threatening to target civilian infrastructure even though such strikes could be construed as war crimes. Trump’s juvenile, trollish renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War is the icing on this self-conscious cake. Or, it would be if we didn’t have so many cringe-inducing comments from Hegseth, such as: “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” His famous dressing-down of his senior staff, actual quiet professionals, should be considered at some length:

We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters. … You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.

This is simply not how American senior military leaders are trained to talk. A glance at Hegseth’s own military career makes this plain. I do not agree with those who scoff at his service (nobody should scoff at anyone’s service). Hegseth had a long and solid career with real combat exposure. That record is blemished by his removal from an assignment based on his Francis-like tendencies, which may have had a hand in his failure to rise above the lowest of the U.S. Army’s field-grade officer ranks. He got out as a major (O-4), which is a fine achievement, but it is also far from the kind of military senior leadership that prepares one for running one branch of the military, let alone the entire thing. The results are predictable. Pentagon insiders are calling Hegseth unprofessional, reckless, even “feral.” They are doing this for a reason. Beneath the eye-rolling and laughter at this Francis is real concern. We dislike insecure bellicosity not just because it’s embarrassing, but because it is ineffective. Tough guys with chips on their shoulders make poor warfighters. Judgment and sobriety are at the heart of effective military decisionmaking. The Army itself advises soldiers to “maintain the high ground,” and research shows that rapid-fire calls made under pressure by the morally immature lead to disaster.

The history of warfare itself, harkening back to ancient times, reinforces this point. Almost from the moment humans first organized to kill each other, we have warned about the dangers of the reckless use of violence, and extolled the virtues of the quiet professional. Sun Tzu, perhaps the most famous military strategist in human history, wrote in the fifth century B.C. that subduing an enemy without fighting was the height of military skill. The ancient writer Pausanias, in describing the Celtic assault on Thermopylae more than 200 years after Sun Tzu wrote his famous book, was at pains to describe how the Gauls “marched against their enemies with the unreasoning fury and passion of brutes” while “the Greeks attacked silently and in good order.” In the Middle Ages, the French disaster at Crécy became an object lesson in the dangers of rushing in.

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The ethos of the quiet professional lives in our own modern American military history in the famous anecdote from the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 when Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was himself caught off guard by his own poor judgment. But rather than reacting rashly, he marshaled a tenacious defense, not losing his composure or allowing himself to be tempted into a hotheaded action that could have led to disaster. Injured on the first night of the battle, he was resting in the pouring rain beneath a tree when Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman found him. “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman asked. Grant did not avoid responsibility for the drubbing he’d just taken. He did not beat his chest and threaten to rain death on his Confederate adversaries. He did not promise to bring harm to their civilian families. Instead, he gave one of the most famous, and perhaps the most quietly professional, replies ever uttered. “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s recruiting has famously used aggressive, macho memes to attract the Francises of the world. The Department of Homeland Security itself described it as a “wartime” surge in hiring, appealing to those seeking to hunt down the “worst of the worst.” The results included the horrific inflection points of Minneapolis, the outright murder of two American citizens exercising their right to protest. We are drowning in evidence that, where violence must be employed, it is imperative that it be a quiet professional making the call on when, where, and to what degree it must be.

The thousands of dead in the Iranian theater, the billions of dollars in damage and economic repercussions, the tarnishing of our country’s reputation on the global stage are the price of ignoring that warning, repeated consistently since human beings first sharpened sticks to make spears.

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