Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and TV personality tapped to be Trump’s secretary of defense, recently said that women should not be serving in combat roles.
The Fox News anchor appeared on a podcast released Nov. 7, days before getting the nod from the president-elect on Tuesday, and expressed his unvarnished views on women in the military.
“I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, it hasn’t made us more lethal, it has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth told the “Shawn Ryan Show” while promoting his book, “The War on Warriors.”
He admitted he was surprised he has not received more “blowback” for his position, which is outlined in his book. The 44-year-old added that women he served with were “great.”
As the conversation moved on, host Shawn Ryan, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, said, “Because when you said it gets complicated, yeah, it does get complicated. I mean, sex happens everywhere.”
Hegseth then clarified that his comments about women referred to “physical, labor-intensive” military roles such as the Green Berets, where “strength is a differentiator.”
“Give me a female pilot all day long, I’ve got no issue with that,” Hegseth added.
The U.S. military lifted a ban on female troops serving in combat roles in 2013.
Hegseth’s nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate, shocked many observers since the role typically goes to career military or national security officials.
“Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history. And the most overtly political,” Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Independent Veterans of America, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Brace yourself, America.”
The current secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, is a retired four-star general who spent 41 years in the Army.
Hegseth, a host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” is a veteran of the Army National Guard and served in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
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In 2015, the Princeton graduate went viral after he struck a U.S. Army master sergeant in the arm with an errant ax throw on a Fox News show.