Broken Windows at the Pentagon

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered a speech identifying the department's bureaucracy as the nation's most pressing adversary and asserting his determination to liberate the Department of Defense. Twenty-four years later, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered a comparable speech outlining revisions to military fitness standards and training requirements and declaring his intention to "liberate America’s warriors."

Rumsfeld grandly characterized his reforms as transformation; Hegseth humbly characterized his changes as common sense.

Indeed, Hegseth restated an enduring adage that to ensure peace, one must prepare for war and articulated "a simplifying test of truth – the department's golden rule would be 'Do unto your unit as you would have done unto your own child’s unit.'"

Notably, Hegseth directly invoked a forty-year-old truism known as the Broken Windows Theory.

Introduced in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, an authority on public administration and a criminologist, respectively, the thesis argued that if a broken window is left unrepaired, then all the rest of the windows will soon be broken and the sequence from antisocial to criminal behavior will commence.