Military hawks and neocons are two different factions. Iraq War basically in the public consciousness intermixed these two interest groups, but historically speaking these two weren't necessarily aligned on the same interests. It might be hard to believe but the old school neocons like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol were against the Vietnam War, which just goes to show how these people work. Military hawks are almost always pro-war because war justifies their existence along with the entire MIC apparatus, whereas neocons are basically power hungry psychopaths who run think tanks, but because of their obsession with power (and how power often shifts in America according to the issue of the day) the neocons will change shirts all the time, which explains why so many have also become Democrats in the Trump era. They sell their soul to glom onto power and have no problem finding or inventing ways to justify why they should control the conversation / institutions / levers of power. In many ways they're for oligarchic totalitarianism, that is their fundamental ideology. Military ends aren't their primary avenue for achieving total oligarchy, so in many ways a person like Pompeo is a more trustworthy figure because at least you know where he stands whereas a Rubio (which btw, I dont think he's necessarily a neocon, he's more of just a straight up prostitute who will be controlled by whomever controls him at any one point in time, so it used to be the neocons who controlled him and now its Trump who will) isnt someone smart enough to create a neocon-friendly agenda on his own. The choice of Rubio seems to be a signal more about how Trump intends to focus on Latin America above anything related to neocons.
