An infantry officer in the National Guard for 18 years, he was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where he earned two prestigious military medals. Arriving at Fox News in 2014, he now hosts the weekend morning show. From the American army, he today denounces progressive positions and could return, once in power, to the policies favorable to diversity established within the armed forces for years. Pete Hegseth even, in a recent podcast, suggested firing the chief of staff of the American forces, General Charles Brown, and any other military official “involved in these shitty woke policies”.
“With Pete at the helm, America's enemies have been warned – our armed forces will once again experience greatness and America will never back down,” Donald Trump said on Tuesday, announcing his intention to appoint him to head the Pentagon.
“Lack of high-level experience”
A “very surprising” choice which shows that the president-elect “wants someone who is loyal to him”, analyzes Mark Cancian, researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington. If the man had an “excellent career as a low-ranking officer”, he “lacks high-level experience in the field of national security and in the management of a large institution”, underlines this former colonel of the Navy. This CV, for a position with immense influence in the United States and around the world, could be a burden for the confirmation process in the Senate – a process that Donald Trump seems to be seeking to circumvent in order to move more quickly. If he were indeed installed at the head of the American Department of Defense, any radical measure, such as a rapid replacement of General Charles Brown, the highest ranking officer, could “cause a crisis between civilians and military,” believes Mark Cancian.
Pete Hegseth, in the same recent podcast, was surprised that another of his positions had not caused more controversy. “I say it very frankly: we should not have women in combat troops. It didn’t make us more effective, it didn’t make us more lethal and it made the fight more complicated,” he declared.
Support for convicted soldiers
His book “The War on Warriors”, released in June, “reveals”, according to Donald Trump, “the betrayal by the left of our warriors and how we must bring back our forces armed with meritocracy, lethality, accountability and excellence.” Pete Hegseth also called in 2019 for clemency for three soldiers prosecuted for war crimes. He had obtained from Donald Trump a presidential pardon for two soldiers convicted of murder and the reintegration into the ranks of a third, convicted of having posed with a corpse in Iraq. An episode of which he says he is “proud” today.
A graduate of the prestigious Princeton and Harvard universities, he lives with his wife and seven children in Tennessee, a conservative state in the southern United States.
