Opinion | Pete Hegseth Has One Thing Going for Him as Trump’s Defense Secretary Pick

Pete Hegseth, like many of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks so far, may seem unworthy of the role he has been tapped to fill. But the instinct to choose someone like him is not.

Mr. Hegseth, the Fox News host and veteran Mr. Trump nominated to lead the Department of Defense, lacks the necessary leadership experience. His antediluvian views on women in the armed forces, his advocacy for soldiers accused of war crimes and his past remarks on racial issues alone should be disqualifying in a confirmation process. (The news last week that he was investigated in 2017 for an alleged sexual assault won’t help his cause.) But his apparent disenchantment with American military engagement abroad and his skepticism of nation-building by armed forces and endless wars should not.

Mr. Hegseth, despite his heavy baggage, represents something that needs to be acknowledged: the deep bipartisan dissatisfaction with a military leadership that has presided over 20 years of failed wars and incalculable costs to America’s veterans and their families. If Mr. Trump could find a nominee for secretary of defense who holds similar views, but without his obvious shortcomings, his choice would be justified.

Mr. Hegseth has become an influential adopter of the isolationist views that have flourished among veterans who bore the greatest toll for the global war on terror. That toll — including combat injuries, diseases from exposure to burn pits, brain damage and a suicide crisis that the Pentagon has entirely failed to stem — has deepened their frustrations with the political status quo. All this has left many of the nation’s veterans, regardless of their politics, with views on war that align with those of Mr. Trump and his Pentagon pick. No number of ovations for their service, early-boarding privileges at the airport or taxpayer-funded trips to V.A. hospitals can make up for what they lost.

Mr. Trump seems to have selected many of his other nominees, such as Representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, for their loyalty. Mr. Hegseth has been loyal, too, but his nomination also signals a point of view on military conflict that many Americans appear to agree with.

Over the past two decades, the mainstream foreign policy establishment — sometimes cynically referred to as the “Blob” — has had enduring influence over American war and peace. As a result, the antiwar views once relegated to the left have now spread throughout American political culture, and certainly the Republican Party; indeed, vice president-elect JD Vance, a veteran, holds similar views.

There have been failures at home as well. Modern Pentagon leaders have stifled innovation and allowed rampant sexual harassment to persist, all while recruitment numbers (other than the Marines) have taken a dive. They have been disingenuous about national security intelligence, the failure to prepare for and prosecute the war in Afghanistan and the chaotic final withdrawal from Kabul.

Recent history has shown that the sort of experience Mr. Hegseth lacks is no guarantee against world-shaking mistakes. Donald Rumsfeld, as one of the youngest defense secretaries under Gerald Ford and one of the oldest under George W. Bush, with decades of experience in between, went to war with the army he had, and we are still suffering from his “plan.”

Before that, Robert McNamara surrounded himself with the “whiz kids” of RAND, cloaking military strategy in the trappings of academic brilliance, and we got 58,220 casualties and a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. The refusal of defense secretaries from the Bush and Obama administrations, through the first Trump administration, to simply tell the truth about what was happening in Afghanistan was how we got here, with an antiwar Fox News host waiting in the wings for Senate confirmation.

In that sense, Mr. Trump’s choice simply underscores the wholly unsurprising fact that military leaders who have traditionally led the Pentagon and its 1.3 million active-duty service members may now be out of vogue within the Republican Party. The bipartisan disdain for the military-industrial complex and the revolving door of contractors and suppliers who feed it has been flourishing for years.

Mr. Trump’s connections to this type of disaffected veteran are deep. At the end of his first term, he nominated Will Ruger, a former Koch Institute honcho, to be ambassador to Afghanistan. Over the past decade in Washington and beyond, a growing left-right alliance has shared Mr. Trump’s strong — though strategically and ideologically inconsistent — opposition to the so-called forever wars. Among Republicans, those views now inform a deep skepticism or even disdain for assisting Ukraine and supporting traditional European alliances.

In recent years, polls have shown a majority of veterans unhappy with those endless conflicts. When President Biden first announced that the United States military would withdraw from Afghanistan, veterans organizations across the political spectrum — including Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group funded by the Koch network; Common Defense, a left-wing organization; and The American Legion — coordinated with the White House’s National Security Council to give Mr. Biden cover. But the withdrawal was disastrous and complicated this alliance. It was these failures and lack of accountability of the senior military officials responsible for them that radicalized veterans like Mr. Hegseth and created the conditions for old-line Pentagon brass’s current reckoning.

We should oppose Mr. Hegseth as undeserving of the post he seeks. But we should not kid ourselves that another defense secretary “experienced” in the ways of modern warfare is the military leader America wants today.

Jennifer Steinhauer is a former reporter for The New York Times who covered military and veteran issues. She is the author of a novel, two cookbooks and “The Firsts,” the story of the women of the 116th Congress.

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