Democrats were downcast after the four-hour Jan. 14 Senate confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s polarizing pick to be the 29th secretary of defense.

“He lacks the requisite character, competence, and commitment to do this job,” grumbled Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the former Armed Services Committee chairman, now relegated to ranking member with Republicans in the majority. “Indeed, he is the least qualified nominee for Secretary of Defense in modern history.”

On paper, that’s true.

While Hegseth, 44, has an impressive resume — an undergraduate degree from Princeton, a master’s from Harvard, 14 years in the Army National Guard, including two combat tours as a platoon leader in Iraq and a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan, as well as leader of two veterans advocacy groups — his national security bona fides are thin compared to his predecessors.

Take for example Donald Rumsfeld, who at 43 was the youngest-ever defense secretary when he first took the helm of the Pentagon in 1975.

By then Rumsfeld, also a Princeton graduate, had been an active-duty Navy pilot and an investment broker, served on the staff of two congressmen, been elected to Congress himself, and was named director of the Office of Economic Opportunity and then U.S. ambassador to NATO before being President Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff.

“Now it is true and has been acknowledged that I don’t have a similar biography to defense secretaries of the last 30 years,” Hegseth said at his confirmation hearing. “But as President Trump also told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly the right credentials, whether they are retired generals, academics, or defense contractor executives. And where has it gotten us?”

“He believes, and I humbly agree, that it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm — a change agent, someone with no vested interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives,” Hegseth said.

It was a message that resonated with Republicans who have grown disenchanted with highly decorated four-star generals such as the legendary Marine commander Jim Mattis.

And what some critics dismissed as evidence that Hegseth was a lightweight, his job as a host of a weekend morning show on Fox News, was also seen as an improvement over the notoriously media-shy Lloyd Austin.

“We must not underestimate the importance of having a top-shelf communicator as Secretary of Defense,” Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) said. “Other than the president, no official plays a larger role in telling the men and women in uniform, the Congress, and the public about the threats we face and the need for a peace through strength defense policy.”

Even Democrats, who spent the whole hearing arguing Hegseth was manifestly unqualified, had to concede his television experience was an asset.

“I don’t dispute your communication skills,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said. “I would support you as the spokesperson for the Pentagon.”

“Yes, Pete Hegseth is an out-of-the-box nominee, and I say it’s high time to get out of the box,” former Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican whom Hegseth called a mentor, said in introductory remarks.

But what won Republicans over was Hegseth’s vow to return a “warrior culture” to the U.S. military with a “laser focus” on “lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability, and readiness.”

Hegseth was quick to admit there were some big gaps in his knowledge but promised to assemble a highly competent team to achieve the goals Trump has set out for him.

“I know what I don’t know,” he said. “My success as a leader has always been setting a clear vision, hiring people smarter and more capable than me, empowering them to succeed.”

“Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional, the nominee is unconventional, just like that New York developer who rode down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president,” Wicker said. “Mr. Hegseth will bring energy and fresh ideas to shake up the bureaucracy. … In short, I am confident that Mr. Hegseth, supported by a team of experienced top officials, will get the job done.”

At the top of his agenda is waging a war on wokeness that Republicans are convinced is infecting the military culture, distracting from warfighting, and dividing troops along social and racial lines, epitomized in the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

“The idea that you pit the room, any room, with oppressor vs. oppressed. It’s race essentialism, and it is poison. It has no business whatsoever in our military,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO). “I think the American people have spoken loudly and clearly about this. They’re tired of this. They’re tired of woke ideology.”

Hegseth was excoriated by Democrats for his writings and prenomination statements suggesting women should not be serving in ground combat roles, including in a recent podcast in which he volunteered, “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.”

“We have hundreds — hundreds of women who are currently in the infantry, lethal members of our military serving in the infantry, but you degrade them. You say we need moms, but not in the military, especially in combat units,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said in a heated exchange.

“I’ve never disparaged women serving in the military. I respect every single female service member that has put on the uniform past and present,” Hegseth responded. “My critiques, Senator, recently and in the past, and from personal experience, have been instances where I’ve seen standards lowered.”

Gillibrand insisted Army standards for the infantry “are gender neutral and they are very difficult to meet. They have not been reduced in any way.”

Hegseth countered that in research for his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, he spent months talking to active-duty service members, who told a different story.

“What each and every one of them told me, and which personal instances have shown me, is that in ways direct, indirect, overt and subtle, standards have been changed inside infantry training units, Ranger School, infantry battalions to ensure that commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted,” he said.

“And that,” he added, “disparages those women.”

“Commanders do not have to have a quota for women in the infantry,” Gillibrand insisted. “That does not exist.”

Hegseth also faced scrutiny for suggesting in his 2020 book, American Crusade, that “modern leftists … literally hate the foundational ideas of America.”

And in another section of the book, he wrote, “The other side, the left, is not our friend. We are not esteemed colleagues, nor mere political opponents. We are foes. Either we win or they win. We agree on nothing else.”

“You said about people who have views differently than you, that we’re the enemy,” Gillibrand said. “Are you saying that 50% of the DOD, if they hold liberal views or leftist views or are Democrats, are not welcome in the military?

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Hegseth did not answer then but later said, “Politics has nothing to do with the battlefield, which is why President Trump has asked me to say, let’s make sure all of that comes out.”

“When you’re in combat or in training, there’s a lot of conversations that happen, and you start to realize that a lot of people you’re serving with share your political ideas or they don’t,” Hegseth said. “You find out there’s Republicans, there’s Democrats, there’s libertarians, there’s independents, there’s vegetarians. Everything in between. None of that matters.”