The Pentagon has been stunned by Donald Trump’s pick for defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, a national guard veteran and Fox News presenter who has called for a purge of generals for pursuing “woke” diversity policies.
Hegseth has questioned whether the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Charles Brown, was given the top job because he is black and accused him of “pursuing the radical positions of leftwing politicians”.
Hegseth was a major in the Minnesota national guard who served as a prison guard at Guantánamo Bay detention camp and served in Iraq and Afghanistan before becoming an outspoken rightwing critic of the military.
He has argued for faster provision of more US weapons to Ukraine for its defence against Russia, but also called US Nato membership into question. His nomination is also a boost for the far right in Israel, as he has shown support for territorial expansion and suggested that Jews could build a new temple on the sacred compound around al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Hegseth told an audience in Jerusalem in 2018: “There’s no reason why the miracle of the re-establishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.”
The Israeli settler movement is also celebrating Trump’s nomination of Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, as the US ambassador to Israel.
In a visit to the region in 2017, Huckabee, an evangelical Baptist minister, said: “There is no such thing as a West Bank – it’s Judea and Samaria.”
He said: “There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighbourhoods. They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation” – a position dramatically at odds with current US policy and international law on occupied Palestinian territory.
Trump’s nomination of Hegseth, 44, a chatshow commentator with minimal managerial experience, to run the US military establishment with 1.3 million active-duty service members and the nearly 1 million civilian staff has taken Congress and the Pentagon by surprise.
Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the house armed services committee, said: “There is reason for concern that this is not a person who is a serious enough policymaker, serious enough policy implementer, to do a successful job.”
Military officials described the choice as having come “out of the blue”, the Army Times reported, and it quoted an unnamed senior military officer as saying the choice raised concerns about whether Hegseth had the experience to manage a government department with a budget of more than $800bn.
In his first term in the White House, Trump found himself at odds with the people he chose to run the Pentagon, but Hegseth has shown himself to be a loyalist with a shared hostility to the military establishment.
Hegseth wrote in his memoir: “The next president of the United States needs to radically overhaul Pentagon senior leadership to make us ready to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. Lots of people need to be fired.”
On Brown’s appointment as chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Hegseth asked: “Was it because of his skin colour? Or his skill? We’ll never know.”
There is concern in the top ranks of the US military that Hegseth could help Trump pursue retribution against generals and other senior officers who were seen to be insufficiently loyal to the president-elect in the past.
In particular, Mark Milley, a retired general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff in Trump’s first term and who resisted Trump’s calls to use troops against protesters, reportedly fears being recalled to service by Trump so he can be court-martialed.
Milley recently told the journalist and author Bob Woodward that he now believed Trump to be a “fascist to the core”.