At yesterday’s Senate hearings to approve an additional $87 billion in war spending , Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who left the military as a National Guard major, blasted the “stale thinking” of his predecessor General Lloyd Austin, the only defense secretary, btw, to have held combat commands in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the one, two, three, and four star levels. “I don’t know what Lloyd Austin did for four years,” fulminated Hegseth. Maybe that’s because restraint and absence of braggadocio were Austin’s defining traits.