How Pete Hegseth is pushing his beliefs on US agency: ‘nothing to prepare forces’

More than 50 days into Donald Trump’s second administration and his Department of Defense is already rapidly transforming into the image of its secretary, Pete Hegseth.

Now, many of the rants and opinions common during Hegseth’s Fox News career are coming to policy fruition in his new Pentagon.

Hegseth inaugurated himself by scolding his Nato allies and confirming the US would never accept Ukraine into the alliance. Then his Pentagon immediately made leadership changes targeting women and people of color. He oversaw total deletions of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs, all the while slashing whole sections of the military overseeing civilian harm reduction in theatres of combat.

Combining all of that with his connections to Christian nationalism and a pastor who said slavery brought “affection between the races” has led to calls from former defense department officials that the new secretary is actively damaging his own agency.

“What are we seeing in the Pentagon right now? What are we hearing about the future of warfare? What are we hearing about the transformation that is necessary, right now, as we come out of the last two decades of warfighting?” said the retired brigadier general Paul Eaton, a veteran of the Iraq war. “We’re hearing of DEI purging.”

Eaton continued: “We’re hearing about taking a Black four-star out of the seniormost position in the armed forces of the United States; a female four-star removed, who was the first chief of naval operations; a four-star female taken out of the coast guard.”

In any national military, fighting cohesion and faith in the chain of command is paramount. But Eaton says Hegseth is a “Saturday showman on Fox News” unfit for the office he occupies and has undermined his troops at every turn.

Eaton explained that mass firings and transgender bans have distracted from learning lessons from the war in Ukraine and the coming global conflict many inside the Pentagon have been predicting for years. Most of all, Hegseth’s focus on culture war is actively neglecting the “warfighters” he constantly invokes.

“What we’re seeing is nibbling around the edges of a culture with a dominant theme that does nothing to prepare the armed forces of the United States to meet its next peer or near peer opponent,” said Eaton.

In a period where the Pentagon has struggled to meet recruitment numbers, Hegseth’s dismissal of top female officers and his historical attitude towards gender is not making enlistment a top attraction among women.

“Comments that question the qualifications and accomplishments of women in uniform are deeply disrespectful of the sacrifices these service members and their families have made for our country,” said Caroline Zier, the former deputy chief of staff to the last secretary of defense, Lloyd J Austin III, and a VoteVets senior policy adviser. “Secretary Hegseth risks alienating and undermining the women who currently serve, while decreasing the likelihood that other women look to join the military at exactly the moment when we need all qualified recruits.”

Hegseth’s office also had social sciences and DEI research axed in a memo announced in early March. The cost cutting measure will save $30m a year in Pentagon funding of internal studies, “on global migration patterns, climate change impacts, and social trends”.

In a post on X, Hegseth said: “[DoD] does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” Those comments match up with his complaint that under the Biden administration the military somehow weakened soldier standards and focused its efforts away from fighting wars in favor of adopting liberal subcultures.

“The truth is the United States military is the most lethal fighting force in the history of the world, and the Department of Defense never took its eye off warfighting and meritocracy,” said Zier. “I saw that up close over the course of 15 years working at the Department of Defense, across administrations.”

Tough talk about “warfighting” and “lethality” has also followed an obsession within the Trump administration with special forces units – the types that carry out drone strikes or a mission such as the one that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Hegseth and Trump, for example, were dogged defenders of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy Seal pardoned by Trump for war crimes in Iraq.

But special operations missions, especially when they have led to civilian carnage, have the propensity to create enemies across the globe if unneeded collateral damage occurs. Which is why new and evolving watchdog policies governing how covert actions are carried out were adopted across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations of the past. By 2023, Austin instituted new orders surrounding civilian harm mitigation.

But Hegseth has closed the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which both handled training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theatres of war. Coupled with plans to overhaul the judge advocate general’s corps to remake the rules of war governing the US military, all signs point to a Pentagon more prone to tragic mistakes.

Eaton thinks that is shortsighted and ignores lessons learned.

“When I was in Iraq in 2004 developing the Iraqi armed forces,” said Eaton. “I would stand up in front of my Iraqi soldiers and I would make a case for the most important component of the US military: our judicial system and the good order and discipline of the armed forces.”

But then, Eaton added, something happened that undermined those words: “Abu Ghraib”.

Not only was Hegseth a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was also a major veteran voice that railed against the Biden administration’s handling of withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Part of that included criticisms of abandoning allies, and yet Hegseth’s time at the top of the Pentagon has coincided with the unprecedented undermining of global alliances – suspending things such as offensive cyber missions countering Russia – which has blemished confidence in military interoperability and intelligence sharing.

Ukraine, at risk of becoming the new Afghan government cutoff from American military support, is fighting for its national survival against a superior Russian force.

In early March, the Pentagon froze critical intelligence and weapons packages as Trump repostured the US position on the conflict. That kind of uncertainty has borne real fears on the ground of the most deadly war in Europe since the second world war.

“I think the Ukrainians and all of us working here regardless of nationality, are anxious about what the future of US support looks like,” said a former US marine currently living in Ukraine and working on defense technologies near the frontlines. “We’re all hoping that the US will do the right thing and provide the Ukrainians the tools they need to end this war and secure their future.”

But so far, Hegseth has instead shown he’s turning the Pentagon’s gaze toward the border in Mexico, another obsession during his time on air, for the first time in over a century and to the containment of China. Ukraine, Nato and the many Pentagon cuts are in the backseat.

The Pentagon did not respond to several emails with a detailed list of questions about Hegseth’s personal impact on policy making on the department he leads.