Editorial: For Pete's sake: Pete Hegseth has a steep hill to climb to be defense secretary

Is an inexperienced manager with no history running anything, no less the biggest single federal government agency, the right person to be in charge of the Pentagon? Say hello to Donald Trump’s nomination of Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Senators — majority Republicans, newly led by John Thune of South Dakota, and minority Democrats alike — have a duty to rigorously test Hegseth’s management capacity. There’s only so much such tires can be kicked in the course of hearings, but senators have a responsibility to test his understanding of the infamous Pentagon bureaucracy and his leadership instincts atop the org chart.

What has fueled Hegseth’s rise to prominence is punditry. For the past decade, he’s been a contributor and commentator on Fox News, where he’s railed against what he sees as a “woke military.” He’s published ideological tracts called “The War on Warriors” and “Battle for the American Mind.”

Unlike his predecessors running the Pentagon, Hegseth has no experience as a manager — not in the military, not in any other large organization. This counts as a major liability given that the Department of Defense spends a cool$850 billion per year, and its military and civilian staff is 3.4 million strong.

What does Hegseth think about the Defense Department budget? Before Trump’s first term, Republicans claimed President Obama had “gutted” the military. Never mind that Trump, decrying a military he claimed had been gutted under Obama, pushed the largest Defense budget in U.S. history even as he cut taxes on the wealthy, one of the big reasons budget deficits spiked.

Trump is now enlisting two super rich men, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead a government efficiency panel to identify waste. Given that the DOD is where more discretionary money goes than any other department, it ought to be in the center of the crosshairs. Where would Hegseth aim?

Senators simultaneously have a duty to probe Hegseth’s positions on issues vital to America’s role in the world and to the well-being of the men and women who serve in the military. We said men and women. Women make up 17.5% of the military’s active-duty force and nearly 22% of the reserves. That includes thousands of women who serve in combat specialties that before 2015 they’d been barred from accessing.

Days ago, Hegseth proclaimed: “I’m straight up saying we should not have women in combat roles.” If the secretary wants no women in combat and thousands are already so serving, this is a conflict — one that in this case, a “don’t ask, don’t tell” workaround won’t be able to solve.

And what would Hegseth say if Trump seeks to use the military to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history? Deploying troops on American soil for such a purpose is almost certainly illegal under federal law, and carries with it a whole host of serious risks. Does Hegseth know the law and understand these risks?

And what exactly was Hegseth thinking when in 2019 he successfully lobbied Trump to pardon servicemembers who had been accused of war crimes? If men in combat (no women, should Hegseth get his way) kill civilians on purpose, would he, as DOD secretary, urge the military justice system the other way? The seat in the Senate committee room should be hotter than the one in the Fox News studio.

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