What to Know About Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Pick for Defense Secretary

President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to lead the Pentagon and the 1.3 million active-duty men and women of the American military.

The choice of Mr. Hegseth, 44, was outside the norm of the traditional defense secretary. But he was a dedicated supporter of Mr. Trump during his first term.

“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Mr. Trump said in his announcement on Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice — our military will be great again, and America will never back down.”

But several Pentagon officials questioned Mr. Hegseth’s lack of experience — other than serving in the military — and raised concerns about his ability to win Senate confirmation, even with Republicans winning control of the chamber.

A Minnesota native, Mr. Hegseth graduated from Princeton University and has a master’s degree from Harvard. He has been married three times.

Here are other things to about Mr. Hegseth.

Mr. Hegseth’s book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” was published in June.

“Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in ‘Die Hard,’” Mr. Hegseth wrote in the New York Times best seller. “But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane — that in fact their ability to live in peace and prosperity has always depended on guys like him being honorable, powerful and deadly.”

During a recent podcast interview, Mr. Hegseth said that General Brown, who is by law the senior military adviser to the president and the most senior American military general, should be fired for being too “woke,” a term for those who support diversity and inclusion.

Mr. Hegseth also asked in his book whether General Brown, an African American Air Force fighter pilot with 130 combat flying hours and 40 years of service, would have gotten the job as Joint Chiefs chairman if he were not Black.

“We’ll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to C.Q.,” he wrote, using General Brown’s nickname. “But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it really doesn’t much matter.”

Mr. Hegseth expressed surprise that he had not received “more blowback” to his book because, he said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.”

Mr. Hegseth said that he was happy to serve with women but that he did not think they should have certain roles in the military, particularly ones that include “physical, labor-intensive-type jobs,” like Special Operations forces and infantry artillery positions.

He vocally supported Mr. Trump in 2017 after the racial storm in Charlottesville, Va., during which a white nationalist killed a protester when he crashed his car into the crowd.

Republicans and Democrats alike criticized Mr. Trump for saying that those who resisted the neo-Nazis and white supremacists during protests in Charlottesville were as much to blame as the far-right crowds who marched on the college town.

But Mr. Hegseth took up the mantle for Mr. Trump.

“I think the president nailed it,” Mr. Hegseth said on “Fox & Friends” after the protests. “He condemned in the strongest possible terms hatred and bigotry on all sides as opposed to immediately picking a side out the gate.”

Any “general, admiral, whatever” involved in diversity and inclusion in the military, including General Brown, “has got to go,” Mr. Hegseth said in the same episode of the Shawn Ryan podcast, using a profanity to describe such programs.

During another podcast, with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Hegseth said that the military’s recruitment challenges were caused by advertising that featured diverse service members.

“There are not enough lesbians in San Francisco, Hugh, to man the 82nd Airborne,” he said. “You’re going to need to go to guys in Kentucky and Colorado and Ohio, who love the country, and pretty soon you will need ads that reflect that.”

Mr. Hegseth served as a second lieutenant at the prison operation at Guantánamo Bay in 2004 and 2005 with an infantry unit of the New Jersey Army National Guard. He later visited there, in 2016, as a member of the media for a report about life at the base and prison on Fox News.

He has called for the expansion of the detention operation, which has 30 detainees now, down from around 600 when he served there. He has also suggested “expediting military commissions,” the war crimes court where the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and others are charged.

Carol Rosenberg, Ernesto Londoño and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

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