Hi, guys, welcome to Smarter News. I'm Jenna, and this is today's quick hit on the hearing

for President-elect Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hankseth. This hearing took

place before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and it lasted a little bit more than four hours.

So I'm going to give you about 10 minutes of highlights about what to know and why it really

matters. But before we get to that, let's do something a little bit different. Let's talk about

why the Secretary of Defense matters and how it actually came to be. There's actually a very

interesting backstory to this. So when President George

Washington was establishing the very first cabinet, there were four positions. Secretary of Treasury,

Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Secretary of War. So it was one of the original

cabinet positions in American history. And it remained the Secretary of War, that title, until 1947.

When in the aftermath of World War II, there were a whole bunch of changes.

President Truman established what looks more like our modern Pentagon, the modern Department

of Defense.

In fact, this is the same year that

the CIA is established, among other things. So President Truman pulls together all the different

branches of the military and puts it underneath this umbrella, which now we know as the Department

of Defense. And there's a new title. There's no longer a Secretary of War. There's a transition to the Secretary of Defense.

And think about that for a second, about how those different titles sound and feel to you.

The Secretary of War has a different posture than the Secretary of Defense.

Again, this was occurring right after this particularly deadly and long battle of

World War II. So now the Defense Department is huge. It is the biggest portion of discretionary

spending, of our taxpayer dollars. It's also one of the nation's largest employers with nearly

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