The second in command to the nation’s military could end up being a Fox News pundit who wants to launch a “frontal assault” against top brass, kick women out of combat, and implement Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda for the world’s third-largest standing fighting force.
The president-elect has nominated Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defense, overseeing a budget of roughly $850 billion and roughly 3 million service members and personnel serving in the nation’s oldest-running agency while the US is embroiled in global conflicts in a period of escalating tensions.
The office was created in the aftermath of the Second World War to centralize governance of the newly renamed Department of War and the various branches of the military.
Most of the more than 30 secretaries in the department’s history have some combination of military records, history in elected office and roles within national defense programs — a mix of decorated veterans, Pentagon officials, scientists and long-serving bureaucrats.
“The best thing one could say” about Hegseth, according to Veterans for Responsible Leadership founder Dan Barkhuff, is that he is “wholly unqualified to lead the [Department of Defense] on merit.”
Veterans advocacy groups are sounding alarms. Republicans in Congress are scratching their heads. Military service members on Reddit’s r/Military are dragging his “beyond stupid” nomination. “The greatest military machine in the history of mankind to be under the thumb of a TV show host,” one user wrote.
Hegseth’s nomination, which came as a shock to members of Congress who will ultimately be asked to vote to confirm him, reflects a broader trend among Trump’s Cabinet-level nominations and White House appointments — grievance-fueled loyalists whose disdain for a perceived establishment matches Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to governing and disregard for expertise and experience in a government that tens of millions of Americans depend on.
Hegseths’s nomination is “the most hilariously predictably stupid thing” that Trump could do, according to former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, a former lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard.
Hegseth “is a highly effective and ferocious media, culture and political warrior for MAGA. And beyond loyal to and trusted by Trump,” according to Paul Rieckhoff, an Army veteran of the Iraq War and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
He is “undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for [defense secretary] in American history. And the most overtly political,” Rieckhoff said. “Brace yourself, America.”
Hegseth graduated from Princeton University in 2003 and received his master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University. While serving with the Minnesota Army National Guard, he was deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. He attained the rank of major and has several service awards, including two Bronze Stars.
He has also worked for several right-wing think tanks and political advocacy groups, including a political action committee that came under scrutiny for alleged misuse of funds before closing in 2018.
Hegseth launched an aborted campaign for a US Senate seat in Minnesota in 2012, and in 2014 he became a contributor to Fox News, where he now co-hosts a weekend edition of the network’s flagship morning show Fox & Friends.
Current defense secretary Lloyd Austin, by contrast, is a retired US Army four-star general, a previous US Central Command chief, a former Army vice chief of staff, and a former commander of the US Armed Forces in Iraq. He is also the first African American to hold those titles.
Austin also received a Silver Star, the nation’s third highest military decoration for valor in combat, and has five Defense Distinguished Service medals.
“I’ll be fair. He’s a major in the National Guard with combat deployment experience. I respect it. But that’s all he offers to the job,” said Gabrien Gregory, an Army Reserve officer and former candidate for Texas state legislature.
“The Senate must not approve someone who is the most unqualified person to lead our military. It’s dangerous,” he added. “The standard has always been — Republican or Democrat in office — the [defense secretary] is extremely qualified, has experience at the highest national security levels. … This is like giving the host the position of manager just because they work in the restaurant.”
The Independent has requested comment from Hegseth.
Trump is expected to reimpose a ban on transgender service members and end a policy that covered travel costs for service members seeking abortion care while stationed in states where access is outlawed.
The president-elect also is expected to direct the Pentagon to gut diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and the so-called “woke” generals that Trump and his allies have accused of crippling military readiness.
Hegseth has suggested in his 2024 book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free that General Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, and an Air Force fighter pilot with 130 combat flying hours and 40 years of service, only got the job because he is Black.
“Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to CQ,” he wrote. “But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter.”
“The dumbest phrase on planet earth in the military is our diversity is our strength,” Hegseth said on the Shawn Ryan Show podcast this month. “First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs … Any general that was involved, any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI/woke s*** has got to go.”
He also told the podcast that he is “straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.”
“It hasn’t made us more effective, it hasn’t made us more lethal, it has made fighting more complicated,” he said. “We’ve all served with women, and they’re great. It’s just our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally — not traditionally — over human history, men in those positions are more capable.”
The man who could be overseeing roughly 40,000 service members stationed in the Middle East has also espoused anti-Muslim views on Fox News and in his books In the Arena, The War on Warriors and American Crusade, in which he compared modern-day “American Crusaders” to Christians who “pushed back the Muslim hordes” in the 12th century. Americans “need to muster the same courage against Islamists today,” he wrote.
Hegseth also supported Trump’s demands for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
On Fox News and in his books, Hegseth has repeatedly raised alarms about “Muslims’ birth rates” and the number of Muslim elected officials in the US.
“Many European countries would have declining populations if not for Muslim immigration. Combine these factors over time, and this is what you get: in 2019, the most popular name in England for newborn boys was Muhammad,” he wrote in American Crusade. “Could the same thing happen in America? Of course. With enough leftism and enough time, anything is possible for Islamists.”
He wrote that the idea that Islam is a religion of peace “is a naive and cowardly worldview, because the alternative is confronting the reality of a threat that’s almost too scary to fathom.”
“Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world,” he wrote. “It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and crushed. Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.”
In The War on Warriors, Hegseth also echoes Trump’s “enemy from within” remarks by labeling political and ideological opponents “domestic enemies,” and has suggested deploying military to US cities, in which he describes police having to navigate “indigenous populations of street addicts and operate under a bizarre set of rules of engagement that effectively cede the territory (neighborhood) to the enemy (criminals).”
He depicts America’s military corrupted by an ideologically opposed invading force and calls for a “frontal assault” to “reclaim” it — what The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War author Jeff Sharlet says sounds like a clarion call.
“The most worrisome aspect” of Hagseth’s nomination, Sharlet writes, is the possibility that Trump did so “knowing his people have already put in place next-in-line loyalist brass to replace generals Hegseth vows to can.”
In 2019, Hegseth successfully lobbied Trump to pardon a former Army lieutenant and a former Army major who were convicted of war crimes. He has depicted the men as wrongfully prosecuted heroes who were targets of politically motivated bureaucrats who did not understand the nuance of combat, a perspective that has been contradicted by the men they served with.
Hegseth is instead a “professional agitator and an active supporter of American servicemen committing war crimes,” Veterans for Responsible Leadership founder Dan Barkhuff said in a statement to The Independent.
His nomination is “immoral, counter-effective, and wrong, and it also thrusts into leadership a [defense secretary] with a facile understanding of professional military operations,” he added.
“The American military’s ability to deal with near-peer adversaries and international terrorism does not benefit from talk show hosts who believe Liam Neeson movies are real life,” he said.