Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, praised women in the military as “some of the greatest warriors” after critics took issue with comments he made about women not being fit to serve in combat roles. In a Fox News interview, Hegseth emphasized that female service members “love our nation, want to defend that flag, and they do it every single day around the globe.”
Hegseth will spend this week meeting with senators on Capitol Hill to court the 50 votes he needs to secure the Cabinet-level position. In a November 7 podcast appearance, he said, “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.” He claimed that women serving in combat roles “hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal” and “has made fighting more complicated.” Hegseth argued that institutions don’t have to incentivize women in combat, saying, “As the disclaimer for everybody out there, we’ve all served with women and they’re great, it’s just our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where… over human history, men are more capable.”
Hegseth also criticized the upper echelons of military leadership for changing standards and prioritizing filling diversity quotas above combat effectiveness, citing a 2015 study by the Marine Corps that found integrated male-female units did “drastically worse” in terms of combat effectiveness than all-male units. He believes that women and men are fundamentally different, with differences in bone density, lung capacity, and muscle strength. “So, I’m okay with if you maintain the standards just where they are for everybody, and if there’s some, you know, hard-charging female that meets that standard, great, cool, join the infantry battalion. But that is not what’s happened. What has happened is the standards have lowered.”
