Leadership Quote by Bill Kristol

The line lands like a moral indictment disguised as personnel advice. Kristol doesn’t argue policy first; he argues desert. “These soldiers” is a rhetorical shield and a battering ram at once: it elevates the troops to unimpeachable status while implying that anyone defending the current Pentagon leadership is, by extension, shortchanging people in uniform. It’s a classic move in Washington combat, where the quickest way to win an argument is to recruit the military’s honor as your witness.

“Deserve” is doing the heavy lifting. It turns a contested judgment about strategy, competence, or war management into an ethical debt. That framing matters because it narrows the acceptable response. If you debate the secretary’s performance, you risk sounding like you’re debating whether soldiers merit adequate leadership. The sentence also avoids naming the secretary, which makes the critique feel bigger than one person: an office failing its obligation, a system allowing neglect.

Kristol’s context is the hawkish, interventionist wing of American conservatism that rose to prominence around post-Cold War confidence and, later, the Iraq-era arguments about resolve and execution. The subtext isn’t only “fire the guy”; it’s “the war effort is being mishandled, and that mishandling is a betrayal.” By centering soldiers rather than civilians, budgets, or geopolitics, he reframes accountability away from the decision to wage war and toward the managerial competence of the war’s stewards. That’s politically potent: it channels public unease into a solvable target - leadership - while keeping the underlying premise (mission, commitment, posture) largely intact.