People are getting it wrong about Hegseth. He wants a "warrior aesthetic," not "ethos."

[harumph]

5. My nephew when he was younger once commented that the Nazis "looked cool."*

He was talking about the tailored Hugo Boss uniforms of the officer class. That would be considered part of the Nazi aesthetic.

The Nazi ethos can be summarized as "Blood and Soil."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil

There is the thing that people espouse or act within - an ethos - and the various ways in which it non-verbally signals itself to the world.

That's a very incomplete way of differentiating, but one that I fall back on.

*Note: nephew no longer holds that view