The Ignorant Pundits Roasting Hegseth over Steak and Lobster for the Troops

Sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen don’t deserve creature comforts while fighting America’s wars. This is what many high-ranking members of the left have spent the past 24 hours suggesting in light of a report published by the New Republic that detailed recent Pentagon spending. Some seemingly decadent line items include:

A $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.)

In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.

A personal favorite was the sudden onset of fiscal hawkishness from Thomas Chatterton Williams, a studiously heterodox writer at The Atlantic whose name is so posh that it comes with its own scullery maid to polish its serifs (and is allegedly impossible to type in the commoners’ Arial):

Needless to say, Mr. Chatterton Williams knows the going rate of a passable lobster tail and will not stand for just anyone’s enjoying the same.

It has been jokes up to this point, but, I have to admit, this demonstrated ignorance of why the Pentagon bought these items is depressing, because it confirms what many veterans intuit: Far too many members of the public, specifically one’s betters, are wholly detached from the realities of military life. Hundreds of the leading cultural, intellectual, and political lights haven’t an inkling of deployments, extensions, and separations, which means that they don’t know — or personally care about — anyone in uniform. That’s tragic. We are abstractions to them: active-duty deaths or suicides to be blamed on the opposition. (And in this, both parties bear responsibility, as the GOP’s “new right” disparages the service member’s role in preserving order.)

The steak and lobster meal is a tradition in the armed forces, and it predates the U.S. by millennia. Homer describes the Hellenic practice of pre-battle feasting, and there can be no doubt that the Christian imagery of the Last Supper influenced medieval dietary practice as warriors prepared their bodies and souls for combat.

In the U.S. military, the frequency of steak and lobster on the menu is largely dependent on the branch and operating conditions. While I was in the Navy, from 2013 to 2018, the meal was one of foreboding, because we knew it heralded an extension of our deployment. You’d take your plate of boiled-looking steak and rubbery crustacean and sit on the mess decks waiting for the 1MC loudspeaker to drill the bosun’s whistle into your skull to introduce the captain, who would share with the 5,500 souls aboard the happy news that a few more weeks or months at sea was what our country needed of us. You would moan about it into your Tapatio-and-mayo-doused steak out of solidarity. But you’d known since the UNREP weeks before — while in a bucket brigade, moving stores to the reefers — that the steaks labeled “Not for Prison Use” and the lobster tails weren’t coming aboard for the fun of haze-gray yachting.

Commentators seemed convinced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is putting down 690,000 lobster tails (assuming $10 per tail) monthly. First of all, he’s too vain. All that shellfish would make him red and puffy — no good for TV and photos. Second, the Navy (with 340,000 active-duty personnel) could handle that kind of buy on its own. Add the Air Force bases (which expect this kind of service as a matter of course), the Army’s being double the size of the Navy, and the Marines’ appetites, and it’s easy to see where the food goes. But one would need to care to know something about the military to know our branches, their sizes, and reputations.

The kvetching about the piano is the bit that reveals just how crude many of our elites have become. It’s not even a particularly expensive Steinway. The left of Buckley’s day would recognize that a $100,000 piano is a concert-grade instrument to be played by professionals for galas, ceremonies, and other events that Air Force brass host. Actually educated at prestigious institutions of learning, a better, more distinguished left would recognize that conservatories produce far more musicians than there are positions to fill in the country’s orchestras and recording studios. Some of these men and women, classically trained and patriotic, apply for the bands of the military branches. It is their dexterous brilliance that will extract from that piano the sounds of victory as well as mourning.

What an embarrassing combination of incuriosity and innumeracy. My hope is that some will feel enough shame to read the comments here and on X, where there will certainly be other veterans sharing their accounts of steak and lobster. I came home with everyone I shared that meal with. Many others did not.

Reprinted with permission from the National Review by Luther Ray Abel.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.