Pete Hegseth, the former major in the military who grew up in Forest Lake and served in the Minnesota National Guard, was nominated this week by President-elect Donald Trump to be the secretary of defense in his cabinet when he takes office in January.
Hegseth, whose role as an anchor at Fox News makes him a polarizing selection, is undoubtedly going to encourage significant changes to how the U.S. military operates. He’s on record saying veterans need better healthcare options, the need to make sweeping changes with current military leadership, keeping women out of combat infantry roles, and finding new ways to attract recruits.
Hegseth spoke at length about all of those topics during a pre-presidential election conversation with former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan on Ryan’s podcast. Below are the words that came out of Hegseth’s mouth, which could help paint the picture of what he’ll aim to do in his expected role as SoD.
His views on the current state of the ‘woke’ military
Briefly, here’s a summary of what the Department of Defense’s DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) Strategic Plan is all about.
DoD is actively taking steps to mitigate barriers that prevent or inhibit the participation of underserved populations in the workforce, to the extent permitted by law. To that end, DoD will broaden its definition of underserved populations to include more than race, ethnicity, and gender. It will ensure Department policies and organizational procedures do not present unnecessary barriers for populations with other identifiers, such as parental or caregiver status; gender identity or sexual identity, to include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and all others (LGBTQIA+); pregnancy; disability, including people with hidden disabilities and the neurodiverse population; members of religious minorities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.
Here’s what Hegseth says about the DEIA initiative.
“The deeper question is how did the military allow itself to go woke? How did our general class, how did our military academies, how did military leaders who are expected to live by an ethos and a code, they’re in the job of meritocracy and lethality, of excellence, of no excuses, of equality and unity, not equity and diversity is ours. The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is ‘our diversity is our strength.’ Our unity is what unites us. Our unity of effort, our ability to say, ‘Yes, we’re different, but we come together as a team to accomplish a mission.’
Gage Skidmore via Flickr
“Standards are dropping, the woke stuff is everywhere, ‘I feel like I’m walking on eggshells.’ I heard that all the time. Eggshells. ‘I’m a commander, I walk on eggshells.’ They’re walking on eggshells. They’re afraid of one misstep on one identification or one gender thing or one racial thing or one trans thing, and the priorities are upside down on what the units are focusing on. Every single one of those distractions means we’re less good at our job, which is supposed to be close with and destroy the enemy on behalf of our nation and bring our boys home. That’s all I care about. That’s what I want a military focused on.”
How would he ‘course correct’ the military?
“Well, first of all, you gotta fire the chairman of joint chiefs (General Charles Q. Brown, Jr.). I mean, obviously you’re gonna 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 s*** has got to go. Either you’re in for war fighting and that’s it. That’s the only litmus test we care about. You got to get DEI and CRT out of military academies so you’re not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking. And then, whatever the standards, whatever the combat standards were, say in, I don’t know, 1995, let’s just make those standards. And as far as recruiting, hire the guy that did ‘Top Gun Maverick’ and create some real ads that motivate people to want to serve. And there’s lots of other ways in which you could identify who gets promoted and what, but there’s an ethos change. I mean, there’s a reason people don’t want to serve because they don’t trust that their senior leaders are going to have their best interest in mind in combat.
“I know there were mistakes made on our tours all over the place, but I at least for the most part had a sense that my senior leaders were committed to the completion of the mission for the right reasons. And maybe there were strategic differences and all that other stuff and it wasn’t always perfect — and that trust is broken and you have to reestablish that trust by putting in no nonsense war fighters in those positions who aren’t going to cater to the socially correct garbage.”
He does not want women in combat roles
“I mean, admission standards, overall standards. I think a huge one is women in combat and quotas. I think the way they pushed that under Obama, in a way that had nothing, zero to do with efficacy, zero to do with lethality and capability.
“I love women service members who contribute amazingly because everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated. And complication in combat means casualties are worse. And when you actually go under the hood again, and I’ve gotten 99% positive response to this, a little bit of pushback, but when you actually break down what they did in the studies to open the door for women in combat, I mean, they just ignored them.
“So the Marine Corps was the only service that actually tried to fight back — now obviously I’m exempting special operations, which thus far has held the line fairly well. Because if they were lowering the standard to become a Navy SEAL just to let women inside the Navy SEALs, that’s going to change the capabilities and ethos of the Navy SEALs, except for a very small example of some female super soldier who’s capable of doing it. But because of how Washington works, they’re going to change the standards, they’re going to push for quotas.”
Hegseth believes the standards for combat have weakened in the military…
“They’re not getting tougher. Take someone like [General Mark A. Milley], I mean, he was calling down to individual units to make sure they had female company commanders after they graduated from Ranger school. Like, what’s the chairman of the joint chiefs doing pushing company command slots for? It’s all an agenda. It’s all to say, ‘Oh, we have this first or we have this, that.’ So that’s proliferated everywhere. The reason women started getting in combat is because of forward support companies, and we were integrating a lot of the rear echelon activities into brigade combat teams), that we’re now deploying forward as an entity. And so you had women truck drivers or fuel or mechanics on these convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan and then they’d be ambushed or hit by IEDs. And suddenly now you have women in combat. That’s maybe a modern reality in a 360 battlefield. That’s different than intentionally saying we’re going to put women into combat roles so they will do the combat jobs of men, knowing that we’ve changed the standards in putting them there, which means you’ve changed the capability of that unit. And if you say you haven’t, you’re a liar.
“Because everybody knows between bone density and lung capacity and muscle strength, men and women are just different. I’m okay with the idea that you maintain the standards where they are for everybody. And if there’s some hard-charging female that meets that standard, great, cool, join the infantry battalion. But that is not what’s happened. What has happened is the standards have lowered.”
He added…
The Marine Corps did the study, and integrated units, meaning male, female, did drastically worse than all male units. And Ray Mabus, who was the secretary of the Navy at time in 2015, said, ‘F*** your study. We’re doing it.’ Because that’s what the Obama administration wanted and everything else changed. So I’m not saying that was the only point. And I don’t know if that’ll ever change. I mean, imagine the demagoguery that would come on in Washington D.C. if you’re actually making the case for we should scale back women in combat. And as the disclaimer for everybody out there, and I’m not really in the disclaimer business, we’ve all served with women and they’re great. It just our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where, over human history, men in those positions are more capable.”
How would he help grow the military with new recruits?
“I do think we’re at an existential moment. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic here when it comes to the [Department of Defense], I think we’re at a s*** or get off the pot moment,” Hegseth answered.
“We are at a tipping point for total institutional corruption. And Trump has a chance to reverse that. Should he, when he, wins. Because what the military did, I didn’t finish the thought on that, is they committed a Bud Light, like they were in search of a non-traditional constituency. They offended their core constituency. So there aren’t enough lesbians in San Francisco to man the 82nd Airborne, and in trying to cater to that, they lost the boys from Tennessee and Kentucky and Oklahoma.
“The traditional dudes who did it because they loved their country or they wanted the adventure or they wanted to try tough things or they need an up and out of their community, whatever it is. They’re like, if I wanted to do the woke crap, I could go to the local community college or local college. I don’t need it here. I think that could change quicker than we think. And I’m not saying people will rush to recruiting stations, but if you bring in a commander in chief that the rank and file Americans respect, and then you speak to their patriotism and their love of country, and then you say we’ve removed this person, this person, this person, we’re putting serious people in that have the best interest of the institution and of your son or daughter, who’s a war fighter, in mind, and then we’re going to create commercials that make you actually feel like you’re going to be a part of something real.
“Fund it properly, do it properly. I don’t know, I think you get rid of these recruiting shortfalls really fast. Because it’s a family business right now, and families are opting out.”
According to the numbers, the Army in 2023 had a 20% recruiting shortfall, which equates to about 10,000 soldiers. The Navy fell short by 7,460 recruits in 2023. The National Guard and Air Force Reserve missed its recruiting target in 2023 by 30%.
What would he like to see happen with the VA?
“I guess in a perfect world I would have it focus on its core mission,” Hegseth said. “Critics would say, ‘Oh, you want to privatize the VA.’ That’s not the idea. The idea is to effectively let the dollars follow the veteran. And the Mission Act did that that Trump passed, which the VA is trying to squelch.”
Why would anyone be against privatizing veteran healthcare?
“In 2016, I was under consideration by Trump to be his VA secretary. I was interviewed multiple times. In fact, I was down to the final two and go up to Trump Tower, up the elevator, sit with him, talk about it, and ultimately I think he thought I was a little young and all that. But I remember he called me at one point in the process and he said, ‘Pete, I want to pick you. I want to pick you. But there’s one problem. Why do all the veterans groups hate you?’ And I sort of laughed, and he goes, ‘No, they hate you.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, Mr. President, let me tell you why.’ Because outside-the-box thinking of, say, providing private choice for veterans is a threat, complete threat to the ecosystem around the government bureaucracy and the VA and the veterans groups.
“They exist to defend their territory and they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s for the betterment of the vets.’ But if vets are getting better treatment from non-conventional places, why aren’t we exploring that? Well, the bureaucracy can’t handle that, it’s not the existing system, it’s not where most of the money comes from.
“The importance becomes keeping the facilities as opposed to what is the treatment that the vets are getting. I know I had overwhelming support from veterans across the country who were thankful that, who believed that veterans choice would unshackle them from driving 400 miles for a basic treatment when they could get it 10 miles from their house and the government pays for it. Or the idea that if you’re abusing a vet, a VA official should be fired.
“So the solutions are simple. It’s choice and accountability. Vets have choice and people that aren’t doing their job or doing it poorly get fired. But government doesn’t do either of those things. And so if you’re going to do that, you better be ready to go to the mat in a way that’s uglier than I think people could imagine. Everyone looks at the veteran space and says, ‘Can’t we get along? Can’t we all agree that we love vets?’ Of course. The budget of the VA is twice the size of the Marine Corps. It’s a massive, massive budget.
“It’s huge. It’s the second largest department in the federal government.
“And yet VA, you can’t be seen in a timely manner and you’re treated like a number. And the warm D.C. just hides behind the warm glow of all that. So I hope all these traditional veterans organizations watch this. They know.”
