Pete Hegseth's bit about dust on his boots is interesting in light of Mattis, Esper, Miller and Austin his immediate predecessors back to Ashton Carton (who was a civilian through and through).
I used to use the line "unless you've felt the weight of the rucksack on your back, you don't know" which is rhetoric used to win an argument in a college dorm but doesn't tell you anything about his knowledge of the PPBE, the JCIDS and Acquisition Process which was put in place over time to prevent the kind of graft that the Trump admin is planning. I learned about this during my first real job out of school while working in the Secretary of the Air Force's office for Acquisition and its bizonkers complex. I ran screaming in the other direction as soon as I could. My good friends who i work with in my softball league run joint programs with the US and UK to build nuclear submarines which has been built over several decades of careful diplomacy and stakeholder management, and another is a finance specialist with the Navy who works ship building programs and he's convinced that all the hullaballoo about delays in US shipbuilding are 100% the fault of the failure to budget consistently because of Congress playing games.
Yeah, dust on your boots...good luck rummy.
https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/ppbe-map