This was supposed to be a column on President-elect Trump’s cabinet and other nominations, but that’s too limited a subject this week. (For those just joining us, the term “SGO,” an acronym for “s**t goin’ on,” was invented by my late friend and former Navy SEAL Al Clark.) There’s too much SGO to be dealt with by any single cabinet member. And Hegseth will have the job of repairing our navy, which has only about 300 combatant vessels in its fleet of about 470 ships. Trump’s nominees range from the excellent (former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe for CIA Director, Sen. Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel) to the hopelessly inexperienced (Tulsi Gabbard for DNI and Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense) and the bloody awful (Cong. Matt Gaetz for Attorney General). The best part of this is that Gaetz — who has been investigated by the FBI and was facing a House Ethics Committee investigation for drug use and having sex with a minor — probably won’t get confirmed. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that he firmly opposes the release of the House Ethics report which absolutely ensures that it will be leaked to Senate Democrats. And we need to mention, at least in passing, Trump’s unwisdom in chipping away at the very small majority that the House Republicans will have. Pulling Elise Stefanik and Mike Walz out of the House — not to mention Gaetz who has already resigned his seat — was not a good idea. Trump won’t get the recess appointments that he wants to speed the confirmation process. Even Republican senators won’t go along with that. We need to gain some altitude over these nominations to analyze some of the biggest challenges that people such as John Ratcliffe and Pete Hegseth will have assuming they are confirmed.(READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Undoing Biden: Trump’s First-Month Agenda) Ratcliffe Must Reign in Intelligence Agencies Ratcliffe faces a highly-politicized intelligence community of 18 agencies, the CIA chief among them. As this column has said many times, unless a president can get intelligence information that’s not colored by politics, policy-making is just guesswork. Ratcliffe must do everything he can to de-politicize the CIA. The first thing he must do is fire, or at least move out of responsible positions, every Biden hanger-on as well as the leftovers from the Obama years. He may not be able to fire them all but, as I wrote last week, he can transfer them to nice places such as Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Ratcliffe cannot reform the CIA without removing these people from positions of influence. Next, he can — with Trump’s backing — cancel the security clearances of people such as former CIA director John Brennan and all the rest of the 51 former and current intelligence officials who signed the letter (released just before and intended to influence the 2020 election) that proclaimed the Hunter Biden laptop story to be Russian disinformation. I’m not sure whether Ratcliffe will be able to cancel the security clearances of Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton but he should try — and try hard — to do so. Ratcliffe can and should also have an internal study done — to report a month or so after he’s confirmed — about whether we have enough “HUMINT,” human intelligence, meaning spies on the ground, and whether we’re relying too much on our spy satellites. Ever since Carter-era CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner shifted away from “HUMINT” to satellites, our intelligence gathering has suffered more than we, outside the intelligence community, can even fathom. Ratcliffe needs to find our equivalent of George Smiley and put him in charge of that study. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, is unprepared for the job of Secretary of Defense. I fear he’ll be eaten alive by the Pentagon bureaucracy but he may prove to be a very pleasant surprise. That won’t happen unless he has a strong like-minded deputy, close advisers, and service secretaries. A Dispirited and Weakened Military for Hegseth Hegseth is a fervent opponent of Biden’s “woke” policies that have disunited and depressed our military. Trump is apparently planning an executive order that would create a board of senior officers charged with vetting all admirals and generals and purging those who have bought into the “woke” policies. Doing away with “wokeness” in the military will go a long way to improve all the services’ pride and fix recruitment woes. He will have the same responsibility that Ratcliffe will have in cleaning out the Biden and Obama hangers-on and either firing them or isolating them so that they cannot affect policy decisions. Hegseth will have to do a lot of things at once, and ridding the military of “wokeness” is only one of them. We have, since the Obama years, fallen behind our principal adversaries in developing military weapon systems and recruiting the right sort of people. Lethality and readiness of the force, as I’ve written frequently, should be Hegseth’s guiding concerns. China’s new J-35 fighter-bomber is just one case. Built on a design reportedly stolen from Lockheed, the J-35 looks just like our F-35. I’ve never been a fan of the F-35 which is an attack aircraft and is now being pushed as an air superiority fighter which it was never designed to be. If confirmed, Hegseth will have to reduce, if not end, purchases of the F-35 and push a lot more money into the Next Generation Air Defense fighter program. If Hegseth has the right people advising him he’ll realize that we need to return to the “high-low” mix which the old “fighter mafia” insisted on when our Air Force was at its best. The “high” fighters had only one responsibility — air supremacy — without which we cannot win wars either small or large. The “low” aircraft were responsible for everything else including the close air support mission of the A-10, a new version of which should be created as soon as possible. And Hegseth will have the job of repairing our navy, which has only about 300 combatant vessels in its fleet of about 470 ships. The Navy plans to build hundreds of more ships over the next ten years, but it isn’t capable of fighting enemies such as China right now. (READ MORE: For Trump, Personnel Decisions Will Be Crucial) That will take an enormous amount of money. The Pentagon budget is almost $900 billion and perhaps Elon Musk can help shift investments to where they will do a lot more good. We’re behind China, Russia, and other adversaries in artificial intelligence, hypersonic aircraft and missiles, unmanned aerial systems, and a lot more. Hegseth needs to study carefully — and my naval aviation friends will disagree — whether we need to do away with our much too vulnerable aircraft carriers and create other systems that can perform carriers’ missions. A shift in naval strategy is obviously in order. There’s a lot more Ratcliffe and Hegseth will have to do and do quickly to meet the threats our adversaries pose. We have to hope that they can live up to the challenges they will face. 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