Trump’s Pentagon pick aims for clash with top military leadership

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary Pete Hegseth has railed against women in combat, voiced support for troops accused and in some instances, convicted of war crimes, and advocated for the firing of the military’s most senior officers accused of supporting so-called woke policies.

Though he has pushed his positions primarily from a Fox News sofa and in best-selling books, Trump’s decision to catapult Hegseth into the top Pentagon job means he is set to put his ideas into action and clash directly with current Pentagon leadership.

Among the generals that Hegseth has suggested should be fired: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. CQ Brown.

The announcement of Hegseth — an Army National Guard veteran and Bronze Star recipient, and Fox News host — took many by surprise both inside the Pentagon and even among Trump allies. It was the first of several Cabinet picks made this week that Trump allies and adversaries alike described as “shocking” – all signs that the president-elect intends to rattle all branches of the federal government in his second term – including the military.

Hegseth’s unconventional background for such a pivotal national security role means he could face a difficult confirmation process in the Senate.

While Hegseth has commented on several hot-topic foreign policy issues, including competition with China and the war in Ukraine, he has largely fashioned himself as a crusader against what many on the right perceive as the politicization of the military.

A Princeton and Harvard grad, Hegseth was CEO of the conservative veteran’s advocacy organization, Concerned Veterans for America, beginning in 2006. He joined Fox News as a contributor in 2014 and was named co-host of “Fox and Friends Weekend” in 2017, according to the network.

He has 20 years’ experience in the military, having served in the Army National Guard as an infantry officer from 2002 to 2021 and leaving service as a major, according to military service records. He served an 11-month combat tour in Iraq from September 2006 to July 2006 and an eight-month tour in Afghanistan that began in May 2011. He also worked as a guard at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from June 2004 to April 2005.

Hegseth has been awarded two Bronze Stars from his combat service.

But Trump’s pick is also in for what could be a contentious confirmation fight as he faces criticism for lacking experience to lead a government department that includes millions of service members and civilians and a budget over $800 billion. Current and former defense officials, and several Republican senators, expressed surprise at Hegseth’s selection after he was announced on Tuesday.

“He is the least qualified person in history of the job,” said a former Pentagon official from the Trump administration.

Many of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress, however, have defended the president-elect’s pick, and some conservatives have argued that a defense secretary like Hegseth is needed to shake up the Defense Department.

“There is a rot in the Pentagon that is deeply entrenched. It requires an unconventional pick, youthful energy, and a keen understanding of Congress and Washington to refocus itself back to the national defense of the United States,” John Noonan, a former Armed Services Committee congressional aide, wrote in the conservative National Review.

In various podcasts and interviews, as well as his most recent book published earlier this year called, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” one of Hegseth’s biggest claims has been that senior leadership has allowed the politicization of an apolitical force.

Hegseth told radio host Hugh Hewitt in June that he believes roughly a third of the military’s most senior officers are “actively complicit” in the politicization of the US military. Speaking about his new book, Hegseth railed against what he described as “woke, CRT, DEI things, gender stuff” that has “seeped into” the military.

“I would say over a third are actively complicit, and then you have a lot of grumblers who are sort of going along, trying to resist the nonsense as much as they can, but they’re not fundamentally changing it,” he said. As of 2023, there were roughly 800 general and flag officers in the US military.

Just last week, he echoed much of the same complaints in an interview on a podcast hosted by Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, saying one of the first actions the Trump administration should take is to fire the Joint Chiefs chairman.

“Well first of all you’ve got to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and you’ve got to fire — I mean obviously you’ve got to bring in a new Secretary of Defense, but any general that was involved — general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go,” Hegseth said.

Brown became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2023 after serving as the Air Force Chief of Staff — a position he was nominated for by then-President Trump. Brown, the first Black man to serve as the Air Force chief, has been a target of conservatives before due to perceptions that he is “woke” or political.

Barring Trump taking any action against him, Brown is set to serve as the chairman until 2027.

Senior officers in the military, Hegseth also said in the podcast, are “playing by all the wrong rules” to cater to “idealogues in Washington, DC.”

“And so they’ll do any social justice, gender, climate, extremism crap because it gets them checked to the next level,” he said.

On multiple occasions, Hegseth has lambasted the Obama-era decision to open up all combat jobs in the military to women, saying it has lowered the military’s standards, made units less effective, and overall made the military less lethal.

“Women shouldn’t be in combat at all. They’re life-givers, not life-takers. I know a lot of wonderful soldiers, female soldiers, who have served, who are great. But they shouldn’t be in my infantry battalion,” Hegseth said in an interview with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro in June.

Asked just last week if he doesn’t “like women in combat,” Hegseth responded, “No … because everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat means casualties or worse.”

Women serve in combat jobs across the military services and have successfully completed some of the military’s most grueling training courses. More than 140 women have finished Army Ranger School, and in 2020, a woman joined the ranks of Army Special Forces for the first time after completing the Army’s Special Forces Qualification Course. In 2021, a woman qualified to join Naval Special Warfare Command for the first time.

In a statement on Wednesday, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Allison Jaslow — an Iraq War veteran herself — said that not only have women “been in combat for some time, but many are tougher than many of their male counterparts.”

“Need proof? Look at the women who’ve graduated from Ranger School, which is so grueling that around half of the men who enter it fail out,” Jaslow said. “Those women deserve a Secretary of Defense who is aware of that reality and also ensures that the culture in the military embraces that reality.”

Hegseth has also railed against the Pentagon’s policies toward transgender troops. Trump in his first term sought to ban transgender service members – a move that was repealed by the Biden administration just days after taking office.

“If you’re medically dependent on drugs to maintain your gender or a particular balance of chemicals inside your body, you’re by definition non-deployable … Something like that should be banned on day one in a Trump administration,” he said on the Shawn Ryan Show last week.

Hegseth – who described himself as a “recovering neocon” after originally supporting the Iraq War – does not have a long record on policy questions like China and Ukraine, but he’s disclosed some of his views through his Fox News show and other interviews.

In one June interview on Fox, Hegseth bemoaned the state of the US military’s procurement system and the threat posed by China’s growing military.

“China is building a miliary built to defeat the United States. The United States right now has a military mostly focused on fighting the last war,” Hegseth said on “Fox and Friends.’ “Our procurement system is antiquated, so we get weapons systems years after they’ve already been surpassed by the next generation of technology.”

Hegseth described Russia’s war in Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “give me my sh*t back” war in his interview with Ryan, saying that he thought the threat of a nuclear war was over-inflated. Hegseth cautioned against “American intervention” with Ukraine pushing Putin into nuclear war, but also expressed skepticism that Russia’s expansion aims would extend deeper into eastern Europe – something the current Pentagon and other foreign allies and partners have aggressively warned against since Russia’s 2022 invasion.

“This idea that I hear all the time … if you don’t stop him in Ukraine then he’s going to go all the way to Poland,” Hegseth said. “I mean maybe in a perfect world where he had unlimited capabilities and he could crown himself King of Europe he would. I think he probably knows enough to know that – probably not going much further than Ukraine.”

CNN reported in 2019 that Hegseth, while working at Fox News, privately encouraged Trump to pardon some United States servicemen accused of war crimes. Trump went on to pardon two service members – Army Maj. Matthew Golsteyn and 1st Lt. Clint Lorance – and restore the rank of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who had been demoted.

The controversial move went against the advice of then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other senior military leaders, who had told Trump that a presidential pardon could potentially damage the integrity of the military judicial system. But defenders of Gallagher and other service members accused or convicted of war crimes have defended Trump’s move as having the backs of military warfighters who are simply doing the dirty work others won’t.

“We sent them to do these really dangerous, dirty, difficult things that no one else would do, and then sort of like the line from A Few Good Men, and then we challenge the manner in which they do it,” Hegseth said last week in the interview with Ryan, pointing specifically to the cases of Gallagher, Golsteyn, and Lorance.

Before Trump’s pardons, Golsteyn was charged with the 2010 murder of an Afghan civilian, to which he pleaded not guilty, and Lorance was found guilty of second-degree murder for ordering his troops to fire on three men on a motorcycle in Afghanistan.

Jaslow harshly criticized Hegseth’s position on Wednesday, saying such advocacy on behalf of service members convicted of war crimes should be disqualifying.

“The active lobbying to pardon convicted war criminals can and should disqualify Pete Hegseth from being Secretary of Defense over any other criticism that may be brought against him, and I hope the United States Senate understands that as they consider his nomination,” she said.

In his conversation last week, Hegseth and Ryan discussed a Trump administration creating “a team … of these guys that have been through what we’re talking about,” that would “know who to go after.”

Hegseth seemed to agree, laughing and nodding as Ryan explained his idea, suggesting that the group also include Tim Parlatore, Gallagher’s lawyer.

“You have to start with people who can say, ‘OK, I know who the political animals were in those places,’ because that’s the challenge of a new administration,” Hegseth said. “Everyone’s going to jump up and down and say, ‘I was this, or I was never really for that,’ because they want to preserve their careers. And you have to have somebody that’s able to call balls and strikes.”

CNN’s Oren Liebermann contributed to this report.