WASHINGTON, DC (Washington Examiner) — Pete Hegseth may have been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to weed the woke out of the Department of Defense, but he has a far bigger bureaucratic task on his hands than just scrubbing the Pentagon of DEI.
Hegseth, a Princeton and Harvard graduate, served for about two decades in the U.S. Army Reserve and the National Guard in New Jersey, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia from May 2001 to March 2021. He deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and then Afghanistan in that order, according to a spokesperson with the National Guard Bureau.
Almost immediately following Trump’s announcement that he picked Hegseth to be his nominee to lead the Pentagon, critics quickly highlighted the Fox News host’s lack of experience when it comes to managing bureaucracy, let alone one the size of the Pentagon.
The secretary of defense leads more than 1.4 million active-duty service personnel and more than 700,000 National Guard and reservists. About the same number of civilians who work in the Pentagon, bringing the number of people within the department to nearly 3 million with a budget believed to be approaching a trillion dollars annually in the near future.
“A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense,” Senate Democrat Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), said. “I lead the Senate military personnel panel. All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.”
Dan Meyer, a national security lawyer, argued that there have been previous secretaries of defense who had stellar resumes on paper but it didn’t translate to a successful tenure.
“Even the people who have the best of credentials for management and connections really struggle in that job,” Meyer explained. “For the most part, [the secretary of defense] isn’t dealing with all these people, [they’re] dealing with the 30 to 40 people that are closest to him in the ‘E ring,’” he said, in reference to the outer ring of the Pentagon where senior leaders’ offices are located.
Trump tapped Hegseth to lead the department because they share a similar view of what they believe has been the degradation of the military’s readiness and lethality due to what they describe as an overemphasis on diversity and inclusion, and it will be the former Fox News host’s job to reverse that trend.
