What to know about Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick to serve as defense secretary

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What to know about Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick to serve as defense secretary

2024-11-14 07:25 Last Updated At：07:31

In picking Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense, President-elect Donald Trump has selected a military veteran and popular conservative media personality with a large following of his own.

Hegseth, 44, has developed a close rapport with Trump, who also reportedly considered him for a post in his first administration. Hegseth has lobbied Trump to release service members accused of war crimes.

Here are a few things to know about Hegseth.

Hegseth complains in his latest book that “woke” generals and the leaders of the elite service academies have left the military dangerously weak and “effeminate” by promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. He says rank and file soldiers are undermined by “feckless civilian leaders and foolish brass,” adding that “the next commander in chief will need to clean house.”

He mocks and misgenders transgender servicemembers and says the military is turning off recruits.

“America’s white sons and daughters are walking away, and who can blame them,” he writes in “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.”

Like Trump, he espouses a traditional view of masculinity, writing that men are innately drawn to fight, compete and prove their strength. Also like Trump, he is sharply critical of NATO allies that he says are not spending enough on their own defense, calling them “self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to.”

He calls the political left, “America’s domestic enemies” and “America-wreckers.”

Hegseth’s writing is contemptuous of the policies, laws and treaties that constrain warfighters on the battlefield, from restrictive rules of engagement to the Geneva Conventions, which he suggests are outdated against enemies who don’t abide by them.

He has little patience for the moral questions surrounding war. Of the Americans who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan to end World War II, he writes, “They won. Who cares.”

He calls to rename Defense Department back to its original moniker, the War Department, and implement a 10-year ban on generals working for defense contractors after retiring from the military.

Hegseth went viral and was later sued after he struck a U.S. Army master sergeant in the arm with an errant ax throw during a 2015 “Fox & Friends” segment.

Video of the incident shows the ax flying over a target and hitting Jeffrey Prosperie, a drummer in West Point’s Hellcats field band, who had been invited to the show for the 240th anniversary of the Army’s founding.

Records show that the lawsuit was discontinued in 2019, and Brandon Cotter, Prosperie's attorney, said in an email Wednesday that “The parties have resolved the matter and will make no further comment.” Prosperie did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Fox News, which was also named in the lawsuit, called the incident “unfortunate and completely unintentional,” said it immediately apologized to him and offered medical assistance, which he declined.

Prosperie has since returned to the network to perform with the West Point band.

Hegseth has pushed for making the military more lethal and said that allowing women to serve in combat roles hurts that effort.

“Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, means casualties are worse," Hegseth said during an interview last week on “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast to promote his new book. “I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles — it hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated."

While he said that diversity in the military is a strength, Hegseth also said it was because minority and white men can perform similarly, something he said isn’t true for women.

By opening combat slots to women, “we’ve changed the standards in putting them there, which means you’ve changed the capability of that unit,” Hegseth said in the podcast interview.

Since then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all combat roles to women in 2016, women have successfully passed the military’s grueling tests to become Green Berets and Army Rangers, and the Naval Special Warfare’s test to serve as a combatant-craft crewman — the boat operators who transport Navy SEALs and conduct their own classified missions at sea.

In 2019, Hegseth urged Trump to pardon U.S. service members who had been accused of war crimes. He advocated for the servicemen’s cases on his show and online, interviewing relatives on Fox News. He posted on social media that pardons from Trump “would be amazing,” and added hashtags with the names of those accused to reporting mentioning his private lobbying of the then-president.

The effort was successful, with Trump that year pardoning a former U.S. Army commando set to stand trial in the killing of a suspected Afghan bomb-maker, as well as a former Army lieutenant convicted of murder for ordering his men to fire upon three Afghans, killing two. Trump also ordered a promotion for a decorated Navy SEAL convicted of posing with a dead Islamic State captive in Iraq.

Hegseth has served in the military, although he lacks senior military or national security experience.

After graduating from Princeton University in 2003, Hegseth was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard, serving overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as at Guantanamo Bay.

He was formerly head of the Concerned Veterans for America, a group backed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch, and also unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in Minnesota in 2012. According to his Fox News bio, he has a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

As Trump formulated his first Cabinet following his 2016 win, he reportedly considered Hegseth to run the Department of Veterans Affairs. He again considered Hegseth when Secretary David Shulkin faced criticism before his ouster in 2018.

Co-host of Fox News Channel's “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Hegseth has been a contributor to the network for a decade. He developed a friendship with Trump through the president-elect's regular appearances on the show. In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson complimented Hegseth's military knowledge, saying his “insights and analysis especially about the military resonated deeply with our viewers.”

He's also written a number of books, several for the network's publishing imprint, including “The War on Warriors." In announcing Hegseth's nomination, Trump complimented that book, noting its “nine weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list, including two weeks at NUMBER ONE.”

Hegseth would lead the Pentagon with burgeoning conflicts on multiple fronts, including Russia’s war in Ukraine, the ongoing attacks in the Middle East by Iranian proxies, the push for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah, and escalating worries about the growing alliance between Russia and North Korea.

While the Pentagon is considered a key job in any administration, defense secretary was a tumultuous post during Trump’s first term. Five men held the job during Trump's four years.

Trump’s relationship with his civilian and military leaders during those years was fraught with tension, confusion and frustration, as they struggled to temper or even simply interpret presidential tweets and pronouncements that blindsided them with abrupt policy decisions they weren’t prepared to explain or defend.

Many of the generals who worked in his first administration — both on active duty and retired — have slammed him as unfit to serve in the Oval Office. He has condemned them in return.

Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix, Michael R. Sisak in New York, Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp in Washington contributed to this report.

Meg Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP

2 charged with setting some Northeast wildfires amid New Jersey drought warning, blazes out West

2024-11-14 07:26 Last Updated At：07:31

BRICK, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey's governor declared a drought warning. Black Hawk helicopters scooped water from a lake to dump on a burning forest in New York state. A park in Manhattan caught fire. And authorities in two states revealed criminal charges Wednesday against people accused of setting some of the wildfires that have plagued the northeast U.S. in recent weeks.

The actions came as conditions in some northeast states are the driest they've been in nearly 120 years as numerous wildfires continue to burn in places that haven't seen significant rain since August. Meanwhile, dry conditions from coast to coast were contributing to the spread of wildfires, particularly in Southern California.

The drought declaration by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy asked people to take voluntary conservation steps, like shorter showers, turning the faucet off while brushing teeth, and waiting until the dishwasher is full to run it. But it stopped short of mandatory water usage restrictions, which would be included in the event of a drought emergency, the highest alert the government can impose.

New Jersey is not yet at the point where communities are in danger of running out of water for drinking or fighting fires. And the state wants to prevent things from reaching that point.

“Please take this seriously,” Murphy said. “We have a very dry winter ahead of us.”

The dry weather has brought a spate of brush and woodland fires to a part of the country that rarely has to deal with them on this level.

Firefighting crews continued efforts to contain a wildfire in a woodland on the New Jersey-New York border that has burned around 5,000 acres (7.8 square miles) in the two states.

No homes have been damaged, but Greg McLaughlin, an administrator with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service, said rugged hill terrain, coupled with few road access points, were making it difficult to fight the blaze from the ground. Water-dropping helicopters were being used in both states. And firefighters in New York took advantage of changing wind directions Wednesday by starting a controlled line of fires to burn away underbrush and leaves that could serve as fuel.

Around 30 miles (50 kilometers) away in New York City, a brush fire broke out in a park on the northern tip of Manhattan, sending smoke billowing across the Big Apple. The city’s fire department has responded to a record number of brush fires over the past two weeks.

“Due to a significant lack of rainfall, the threat of fast spreading brush fires fueled by dry vegetation and windy conditions pose a real threat to our members and our city,” Fire Commissioner Robert S. Tucker said in a statement.

Late Wednesday, police in the Philadelphia suburb of Evesham Township said they had charged a juvenile with deliberately setting an Oct. 30 fire that burned less than a tenth of a square mile. The youth, whose age was not released, was arrested Nov. 7 and taken to a juvenile detention center.

On New York's Long Island, a 20-year-old volunteer firefighter was charged with intentionally setting a brush fire Tuesday that wound up damaging a parked car, the Suffolk County Police Department said in a news release.

Dry conditions from coast to coast were contributing to the spread of wildfires.

Across the country, California made good progress against a major wildfire in Ventura County, northwest of Los Angeles, that broke out a week ago and quickly exploded in size because of dry Santa Ana winds. The Mountain fire was 60% contained on Wednesday.

The 32-square-mile (83-square-kilometer) fire forced thousands of residents to flee and has destroyed more than 215 structures, most of them houses, and damaged at least 210.

The fires in the Northeast haven't caused major evacuations, but a Connecticut firefighter died battling a wildfire last month and the blaze on the New York-New Jersey border claimed the life of an 18-year-old New York state parks employee who was assisting firefighters last weekend.

Dry conditions in the northeast U.S. are a growing concern, not only for firefighting efforts but for the continued availability of drinking water.

Two major reservoirs in New Jersey were at 51% and 45% of capacity on Wednesday, enough to keep the taps flowing, but low enough to cause concern for what might happen with additional weeks or months of low rainfall. One river that is a supplemental source of drinking water was at 14% of normal.

September and October were the driest two-month period ever recorded in New Jersey. Since August, the state has received 2 inches (5 cm) of rain when it should have gotten a foot (0.3 meters). No significant rainfall was in the foreseeable forecast, officials said.

New York City issued a drought watch last week. Mayor Eric Adams mayor urged residents to take shorter showers, fix dripping faucets and otherwise conserve water.

Just 0.01 inches (0.02 centimeters) of rain fell last month on the city’s Central Park, where October normally brings about 4.4 inches (11.2 centimeters) of precipitation. New York says it was the driest October in over 150 years.

Massachusetts declared a drought Tuesday after more than a month of decreased rainfall.

The ground is also bone-dry, McLaughlin added. This makes wildfires even more dangerous in that they can burn downward through dry soil and root systems, and endure for months.

On a ground dryness scale in which 800 is the highest possible score, New Jersey is at 748, meaning that the soil is dry almost 8 inches (20 centimeters) below the surface. That level had never before been reached, McLaughlin said.

A wildfire that broke out July 4 in New Jersey's Wharton State Forest by someone using illegal fireworks has long been considered contained. But it has been smoldering underground for four months and could reignite above ground, McLaughlin said.

Associated Press writers Christopher Weber in Los Angeles and Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire contributed to this report.

What to know about Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick to serve as defense secretary

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What to know about Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick to serve as defense secretary

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