Donald Trump's appointee to head the Department of Defense came under criticism from retired Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, as his limited experience in the military and inexperience in leading anything but a weekend Fox News show is causing backlash.
Nichols spoke on Friday in a podcast with The Atlantic about Pete Hegseth's appointment as nothing more than "pure provocation."
While his "scandals and inflammatory rhetoric" are prompting questions, Nichols argued that the biggest danger that Hegseth presents is in recreating the U.S. military the way Donald Trump believes it should be.
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"Hegseth’s going to sit at the top of all that, with no experience in any of this—not in budgeting, not in strategy, not in dealing with allies," Nichols told podcast host Hanna Rosin.
"I keep having these just head-spinning moments where I think about the first day in the office, and Pete Hegseth has to make calls to his equivalents, to his opposite numbers, as they do in this job," continued Nichols. "That’s another thing that you don’t do if you’re the secretary of HUD—you don’t call all the housing secretaries on the planet to say hello."
Yet, Hegseth will "be on the phone with the Russian minister of defense. He’s going to be on the phone with the Chinese minister of defense. The people [who] have had these jobs have had exposure to folks like that. This is a guy who’s done none of that— nothing. There’s literally zero background," the column noted.
Rosin read from Hegseth's book, recalling his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion, saying it made the U.S. military weak. The comments have been criticized by women in military leadership and officials.
Speaking to "Face the Nation" last Sunday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who lost her legs in combat, called the sentiment "flat-out wrong."
"Our military could not go to war without the women who wear this uniform," Duckworth said. "And frankly, America's daughters are just as capable of defending liberty and freedom as her sons."
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According to Nichols, this made-up problem "comes from, like, morning editorial meetings at Fox."
"I worked with senior military officers, including a lot of my students who had just come back from deployments, and you just didn’t hear anybody talk this way about, you know, Marxism rampant in the Pentagon and DEI is destroying us—in part, because a lot of those folks were standing right next to people that Hegseth would say were DEI promotions," he continued.
"This is kind of the out-of-control bro culture that Hegseth came up in, and some of it’s just generational," Nichols said.