A thought experiment: Suppose you assembled 100 intelligent, public-spirited people experienced with the complexities of managing enormous bureaucracies, deeply familiar with today’s geopolitical challenges, alert to the importance and sensitivities of allied nations, and acquainted with large private-sector manufacturing and the precarious condition of the U.S. defense industrial base.

Suppose you asked each of these 100 to list 100 people qualified to be defense secretary. There could be, cumulatively, 10,000 different names.

What is the probability that even one of those would be Pete Hegseth? Approximately zero.

If the task is to capture a heavily defended hill, select Hegseth, a decorated combat veteran. Or perhaps Army Gen. George S. Patton. Or Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis “Chesty” Puller. But you would send none of those three — Patton commanded an army, Puller a division, Hegseth a platoon — to command the Pentagon.

Today, defense secretary is the most demanding and consequential Cabinet position. So, let us stipulate certain things:

Hegseth, 44, should be presumed sincere when he says his alcohol-fueled sexual rowdiness is in his regretted past. Controversies about his past loutishness should not be dispositive when deciding whether he should be confirmed.

There are ample other reasons to reject his nomination.

An independent forensic accountant found evidence of gross financial mismanagement while Hegseth was administering two small nonprofits. This information is redundant evidence of what is facially obvious: his unreadiness to manage the Pentagon’s almost $900 billion budget (soon, one hopes, $1 trillion), 3.4 million military and civilian employees, and relations with myriad contractors and foreign military leaders.

Hegseth worries that the military’s “warrior culture” has been diluted by DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) preoccupations that have seeped in from portions of the civilian culture, distracting the services from focusing on lethality that deters wars or wins them. Wokeness can, however, be scrubbed from the military in a morning: Orders sent down the chain of command will be obeyed. More daunting problems — e.g., reviving military and nonmilitary shipbuilding, deciding whether aircraft carriers, F-35 fighters and other weapons systems are right for a rapidly changing threat environment — are many orders of magnitude more difficult to solve.

Granted, one miscast defense secretary had glittering credentials. Robert S. McNamara came to the Kennedy administration from Ford Motor Co.’s presidency. He was considered an administrative wizard and a polymath. He surrounded himself with “systems analysts,” who were the policy fad du jour in the 1960s. He and they thought that “the best and the brightest,” armed with MBAs and sufficient data, could subdue Vietnam, Capitol Hill and other trouble spots. House Speaker Sam Rayburn was skeptical: “I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”

In government’s upper reaches, prior credentials, acquired in the private and public sectors, should include judgment, gained from political or government experience. These do not guarantee success, but their absence foretells failure.

Some Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats in Hegseth’s confirmation hearing were preoccupied with questions pertaining to gender (e.g., women in combat). These, while important, are less so than others. One exemplary Democrat highlighted some.

In his opening statement, Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), West Point Class of 1971, former chairman of the committee, now its ranking minority member, noted Hegseth’s “disregard for the law of armed conflict” and “support for service members who have been convicted of war crimes. You have championed the pardoning of military members who were turned in by their fellow soldiers and SEALs, as well as military contractors convicted of killing 14 Iraqi civilians without cause.”

Hegseth, Reed said, has advocated the reinstitution of interrogation methods such as waterboarding that the United States considers torture. How, Reed wondered, would Hegseth as secretary “maintain good order and discipline”?

Reed noted Hegseth’s statements, in books and in cable television fulminations, against “modern leftists” who are “the soul of the Democratic Party.” Reed could have cited Hegseth’s “welcome to the Warring Twenties!” And: “If you don’t own a gun, buy one. Train to use it. Then buy more.” Because, “Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

Reed, who has voted to confirm nine defense secretaries, including those of the first Trump administration, said: The defense secretary’s challenge “is to remove partisan politics from the military. You propose to inject it.”

In last Monday’s inaugural address, President Donald Trump vowed to encourage a “merit-based” society. He certainly did not start with the Pentagon’s E-ring.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.