Hegseth, Caine Remind Senate Youth Delegates That Rebuilding the Force Starts With People

By the time Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stepped into the Pentagon Library and Conference Center on the afternoon of March 13, the room had already heard one charge from the nation's top uniformed officer.

"The most important thing you're ever going to have in your life is people," Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the 104 student delegates gathered for the 64th annual United States Senate Youth Program.

A short time later, Hegseth met them with a blunt measure of service, calling America's men and women in uniform the country's "real 1%."

Between those two ideas - people and service - lay the deeper story of the afternoon, and perhaps of the program itself: good citizenship requires citizens to serve their nation. While military service is one way to do that, service can take many forms.

Created by Senate Resolution 324 in 1962, the youth program annually brings 104 high-achieving students - two from every state, the District of Columbia and the Department of War Education Activity - to the nation's capital for Washington Week, an intensive week of exposure to the federal government and the people who lead it. The War Department selects 17 military officers to serve in the program as mentors and ambassadors.

A visit with War Department leadership is included in Washington Week. While at the Pentagon, those students and mentors met with two of the department's senior leaders for an afternoon centered on leadership, public service and the department's place in the larger part of government.

Hegseth framed his remarks around the priorities he said are driving the department:

• Restoring the warrior ethos;
• Rebuilding the military; and
• Reestablishing deterrence.

The military, Hegseth told the delegates, exists to be disciplined, trained, accountable and ready "to fight and win our nation's wars." It is not, he added, "a social experiment."

But last week, the human side of that argument stood just as tall as the strategic one.

Hegseth told the students that the word "elite" is too often attached to status, wealth or credentials. Real excellence, he said, is found in the men and women who raise their right hands in defense of something bigger than themselves. He described his own role as serving those service members and making sure they, their commanders and their noncommissioned officers have what they need.

In other words, rebuilding the military is not only about investment. It is also about stewardship - of standards, of institutions and, above all, of people.

Caine approached the same idea from a different perspective. He urged the delegates to become "curious humans" and reminded them that "all great leaders are big-time readers." He encouraged them to choose a life that includes service - whether in uniform, in government or in their communities - and said the return on that choice may not be fully visible until years later.

If Hegseth spoke in the language of readiness and deterrence, Caine spoke in the language of a team. Service, he suggested, is inseparable from the people beside you. The lesson that seemed to land hardest was the simplest one: "The greatest gift that I've ever been given are the people that I am blessed to serve with."

For a program designed to deepen young Americans' understanding of government, the message was fitting. Institutions and policy are both important, but neither means much without the men and women who carry out the mission.

That is the part of the youth program the military mentors understand best.

Air Force Lt. Col. Britney Hensley, the senior military mentor and commander of the Ohio Air National Guard's 126th Intelligence Squadron, said the program is personal for her. Raised in a small Ohio town, drawn to serve after Sept. 11, 2001, and shaped by mentors through a difficult childhood, Hensley said serving the delegates is "another chance to give back."

She described Washington Week as "a lifetime of events in Washington, D.C., in one week," but with unusual access - the kind that allows students not just to see government, but to feel close enough to ask real questions of the people inside it.

For Hensley, that access matters because many delegates arrive with little or no direct experience with the military. One student told her she had come in with one view of the armed forces and left with another. By week's end, Hensley said, she and the other mentors walked away with something, too: optimism.

"These kids are the best and brightest from their states," she said. "They are incredible."

Navy Lt. George T. Denove, the assistant senior military mentor and a Navy cryptologic warfare officer, framed the week with a line he carries from the Naval Academy endurance team he now helps coach: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Mentorship, for Denove, is not a one-week obligation. It is a long relationship, sometimes a life-changing one.

That sort of quiet influence is central to the week. Delegates arrive with questions shaped by headlines, assumptions and bias. Mentors, Denove said, can help them move past the inch of the story they may have seen and into the fuller picture of how the military thinks, decides and serves.

Army Capt. Amelia Weaver saw the same thing through another doorway into service.

Weaver said the Army-Baylor University doctoral program in physical therapy first drew her into uniform because she could imagine no more honorable way to provide care than by serving those who place their health on the line for the nation.

Now a Medical Service Corps officer and former commander of an advanced individual training company, she came to the youth program wanting a two-way exchange: to share what she had learned and to better understand what drives young people who are already operating at such a high level.

That exchange, she said, has practical consequences. During the week, she spoke with several students interested in medicine who had never considered military scholarships or military service until now.

"There are definitely seeds planted as a result of this week," Weaver said.

Marine 1st Lt. Benjamin Currey may be the clearest example of what those seeds can become.

As a Rhode Island delegate in 2019, Currey left Washington Week certain that the Naval Academy and national service were where he belonged. In a reflection after that trip, he wrote that conversations with military mentors had reaffirmed his decision and deepened his understanding of service and sacrifice. Years later, now a rifle platoon commander in Hawaii responsible for about 40 Marines and sailors, Currey returned to the program as a mentor.

"It's kind of a full-circle event now," he said.

Currey said his own relationship with the mentors did not so much change his course as strengthen it, helping him see the weight and meaning of the life he was choosing. Now he sees that same possibility in today's delegates.

The mentors, he said, present "the ideal image of a military officer," and the bonds formed during the week should transcend the program itself.

Among the delegates, that effect was easy to hear.

Ava Ellis, an education activity student from a military family, admitted she initially assumed the military mentors might be little more than escorts.

"I was kind of like, 'aren't they just security?'" she said. "But my mentor has been amazing."

Ellis, who is considering a career in the Air Force, said some of the week's most meaningful moments were not the grand ones, but the smaller, more human ones - conversations with her mentor, time with fellow delegates and the feeling of seeing government up close rather than at a distance.

Michael Carbone, an education activity delegate born in Baumholder, Germany, said he arrived already interested in attending the Naval Academy. By week's end, he had practical guidance on ROTC, service-academy timing and the ways national security and public service can intersect.

"It's been great to get to talk to [the mentors] and hear their experiences," he said.

That may be the quiet strength of the Pentagon's role in the youth program.

The program does not exist to produce officers, and its mission is broader than military recruiting. Its purpose is to cultivate a deeper understanding of government and a lifelong commitment to public service. But the War Department's contribution gives that mission a distinctly human face. The mentors do not just argue for service in the abstract; they embody that service.

That matters for a department whose senior leaders prioritize rebuilding the military. Strength is measured in platforms, munitions, training hours and budget lines. But it is also measured in whether talented young Americans can imagine themselves in the work - whether they can see the department not as some bureaucratic institution, but as a team of real people bound by duty, standards and care for one another.

Last week, the themes that surfaced again and again - service, teams and people - formed the connective tissue between a secretary focused on rebuilding the force, a chairman intent on forming leaders, mentors determined to give back and students beginning to decide what kind of public servants they want to become.