On Palm Sunday 2005, Leigh Ann Hester woke up in a tin can six hundred miles east of Jerusalem, put on her Army fatigues, and jumped into a Humvee, which drove her outside the wire and into a war zone. Back then, Pentagon policy prohibited women from serving in direct combat roles, but Hester was in Iraq, where war lines had been blurred since the beginning of the conflict. Military brass routinely placed women in putative combat environments while formally depriving them of the recognition that their roles were just as dangerous as the combat positions in infantry, tank, and artillery units, all of which were reserved for men. Among other things, these female soldiers operated dangerous checkpoints, searched towns for explosives, and provided convoy security on frequently booby-trapped roads. While these figures pale in comparison to those on the other side of the conflict, more than 1,000 women in the U.S. military were wounded in the war on terror, and 166 died.
In 2005, Hester was practically a kid—twenty-three, with traces of acne on her cheeks and blonde hair she tied tight in a bun. She was also a sergeant in a Kentucky National Guard unit known as Raven 42. Their assignment that Sunday was convoy security. She and nine other Ravens were tailing approximately thirty supply trucks on a dusty road southeast of Baghdad. Not long into their mission, they heard the faint sounds of gunfire and explosions at the head of the convoy. As they started to speed toward the sound, the Humvee in front of Hester was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade, blocking the road and, according to the military’s account, “stopping the convoy in the kill zone.” The Ravens were outnumbered five to one by Iraqi fighters, who, per the Pentagon, wanted hostages.
Hester and her squad leader, Timothy Nein, acted quickly. She ordered a gunner to fire toward the fighters’ position in a nearby orchard, then began shooting her own M4 rifle. She and Nein subsequently directed their team to a flanking position, where, over forty-five minutes, they cleared trenches and killed combatants. While three members of her unit were wounded, all survived. Three months later, in a ceremony at Camp Liberty, in Baghdad, Hester was awarded America’s third-highest combat decoration for valor: the Silver Star. She was the first woman to receive the honor since World War II and the first woman ever to receive it for combat action.
Hester’s “conspicuous gallantry,” as the military called it, came at an inopportune time for a pack of congressional Republicans then barking from the comfort of Capitol Hill about the need to statutorily restrict women from combat. The congressional language, part of the 2006 defense authorization bill, was cowritten and championed by John McHugh, a civilian Republican from New York who wanted to “protect” America’s “mothers, sisters, wives and daughters,” specifically by preventing women in support roles from advancing to combat positions—a ban the Army staff director estimated would make twenty-two thousand jobs off-limits to women.
Hegseth tells of a mythic, unnamed Vietnam war veteran he met at nineteen. The vet’s advice was simple: “Whatever you do, don’t miss your war.”
A few months after Hester’s firefight, a brash, handsome twenty-five-year-old National Guard lieutenant named Pete Hegseth landed in Iraq, not far from where the Ravens’ convoy had been hit. He’d hustled hard to secure a slot as a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne, a division of the Army that had gone mainstream four years earlier thanks to Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers. (At least one former officer serving with Hegseth rightly predicted that he’d eventually parlay his deployment into public office.) There, he oversaw about forty men in a bloodthirsty brigade nicknamed Kill Company that tallied their body counts on a whiteboard. Shortly after he moved on from the company to a civil-affairs post, the brigade was ensnared in a war crimes case after soldiers let three Iraqi detainees loose and shot them in the back as they ran away.
People who served with Hegseth generally agree that he was a good leader and coolheaded in combat. But his conduct was not especially remarkable. Hegseth came away from Iraq with a Bronze Star to Hester’s Silver. His was given without valor, a lesser version of the medal that, according to the Washington Post, was “issued somewhat liberally” during the war on terror. (Some in the enlisted ranks joked that this decoration was little more than a “participation trophy” for needy officers.) Hegseth’s award citation is dry and formulaic, chock-full of the platitudes used by the White House to sell the public on the war. It asserts that Hegseth “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.” Hester’s citation, by contrast, reads like an excerpt from a Tom Clancy novel. It lays out the conditions that day—“75 degrees and sunny with a 10 knot breeze from the southwest”—before chronicling the “well-coordinated ambush” and Raven 42’s canny tactical response, detailing the “heavy volumes” of grenade-launcher and machine-gun fire Hester directed at “an overwhelming number” of fighters as she also fired away.
This discrepancy seems to have weighed on Hegseth. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth casts Hester’s actions as an aberration. He also takes issue with the military’s “political” awards process, musing conspiratorially over the fact that her star was issued relatively quickly, within a matter of months. “Nothing happens that fast,” he claims. “Unless there is an agenda.” Hegseth is sympathetic to his former sergeant major, Eric Geressy, who had his own grievances about women in combat. Geressy complained about Monica Brown, a combat medic who earned a Silver Star in 2008 after delivering life-saving aid in Afghanistan as “rounds were literally missing her by inches,” according to a member of her platoon. Hegseth quotes Geressy’s complaint that he found it impossible to escape Brown’s story, whining that the Army plastered her picture in chow halls and military balls. “Why is that?” Geressy asked. “None of my guys had their picture on the wall.”
Hegseth’s objections amount to more than just professional jealousy. Hester and Brown’s performances became a symbol, one that helped to effectively squelch the movement to cut off women from the front lines. In 2014, McHugh, then Army secretary, seemingly had a change of heart, formally opening thirty-three thousand combat and other roles to women, while the following year Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all units to women, including special-operations teams. What followed was a decade-long window in which military women were able to move up the ranks. Thousands secured slots in the special forces, while others broke into the top brass. Now, as defense secretary himself, Hegseth is working to reverse this progress, purging the Pentagon of numerous senior women and trans people and relitigating the issue of women in combat.
Hester is puzzled as to why the Pentagon is revisiting an issue she already put to bed once. Perhaps, she reasoned, it’s because some male soldiers had “their feelings hurt.” Hegseth certainly seems wounded by Hester’s recognition, and it’s easy to see why: she showed him up at what was supposed to be a man’s game. Throughout his life, Hegseth has perceived the expanding choices and public roles available to women, both within the armed services and without, as a threat to male authority and freedom. His devotion to the military seems to stem from the fact that it is America’s last bastion of unquestioned male power. Perfectly paralleling Hegseth’s Army career is a pattern of cruel and self-destructive personal behavior—emotionally tumultuous marriages marred by heavy drinking, rampant cheating, and alleged rape. But time and again, Hegseth’s military credentials deflected attention from his indiscretions.
While he now charges that the power structure undergirding his life of impunity has been destroyed by “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), feminism, genderism, safetyism, climate worship, manufactured ‘violent extremism,’ straight-up weirdo shit, and a grab bag of social justice causes,” nothing could be further from the truth. For a brief moment in the lead-up to Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, it did seem that Hegseth’s future was in the hands of a woman: Republican Senator Joni Ernst, herself a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor who, like Hester, did dangerous convoy security in Iraq. Ernst was clearly unenthusiastic about Hegseth’s regressive views on women and his checkered personal history. But Hegseth’s allies launched a pressure campaign against her, and she ultimately backed down, pledging to “work with Pete to create the most lethal fighting force”—rhetoric that suggests a commitment to militarism is still capable of obscuring a multitude of sins.
My Penis Is Furious
In high school, Pete Hegseth was a model student: athletic, religious, with good grades. During his senior year, in 1999, Hegseth was starting point guard of the basketball team, captain of the football team, and class valedictorian.
Many young men seek strength but ultimately confuse it for the Pentagon’s brand of violence and domination.
He also seemed to be a loving boyfriend. Hegseth’s 1999 yearbook features two photos of him and his high school sweetheart, Meredith Schwarz, in a warm embrace. The class voted them “Most Likely to Marry,” and their gushy quotes about each other in the yearbook help explain why. Hegseth says Schwarz is “as beautiful, caring, intelligent, and loving inside as she is outside.” She hails his “heart of gold.” They were bound by love and destined, it seemed, for a picturesque life befitting a couple headed to elite colleges—he to Princeton, she to Barnard.
Back then, Hegseth was also reportedly free of the vice that would later shadow his career. One former friend said that, during high school parties, Hegseth would chug only Mountain Dew. He was also singularly focused on Schwarz. As this pal recalls, the two were saving themselves for marriage.
Once Hegseth entered college, however, something changed, and he began to unravel. “He was that classic case where, in high school, he was tightly controlled as a person, because of his church and his intense desire to succeed,” Hegseth’s former friend told me. “Under all that were repressed impulses.” Among other things, Hegseth was ashamed of what he perceived as his own softness. “I didn’t get in fights as a kid and shied from confrontation because, frankly, I was scared of it,” he writes in his 2016 book In the Arena. He goes on to hail his father, Brian, for his “integrity” and “Scandinavian work ethic,” while evincing regret that Brian failed to teach him the art of aggression. “My father was—and is—an incredible man,” Hegseth insists. “But confrontation isn’t necessarily his forte.”
The military would succeed where his father had failed. As a boy, Hegseth had stared admiringly at vets in local military parades. In In the Arena, he tells of a mythic, unnamed Vietnam war veteran he met at nineteen. The vet’s advice was simple: “Whatever you do, don’t miss your war.”
Many young men seek strength but ultimately confuse it for the Pentagon’s brand of violence and domination. Hegseth seems to be one such case, though he was surely enticed by other perks, too, like class mobility and prestige. He grew up middle class but dreamed of money, wishing in his yearbook biography to one day “roll in the dough.” Between two programs—West Point and Princeton—he chose the latter, opting to attend a school that conferred not only power but proximity to capital. In addition to his involvement in the storied Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, known as the Tiger Battalion, Hegseth also distinguished himself as publisher of the hyperconservative Princeton Tory. He’s since reflected on the connection between these pursuits, noting that ROTC taught him how to “channel nervous energy into physical confrontation,” while the Tory built his ability to “stomach ideological warfare.”
College discourse back then was largely mediated through student publications, bulletin boards, and debate. Hegseth spread his voice chiefly through a Tory column called “The Rant” and via the writers he nurtured and edited there. But he had a loud physical presence too. After the 2000 election, for instance, Hegseth proudly donned a T-shirt that derided the Democratic presidential ticket as “Sore–Loserman.” He also joined a dueling society where, clad in old-style clothes, he once fired a paintball into the crotch of a Young Democrat.
Attention was Hegseth’s lifeblood, driving him to clever stunts but also frequent bouts of irrationality. In the grand tradition of campus warfare, he cast Princeton, of all places, as teeming with the “spawn-of-Woodstock leftists” and hyperradical feminists focused on “erasing the concept of . . . masculinity.” In truth, Princeton was an exceptionally friendly environment for men, military and otherwise. In 2003, the Associated Press reported on what may have been the most decorous antiwar scuffle in the history of higher education. It involved Princeton’s ROTC commander, a lieutenant colonel named Matthew McCarville, and an antiwar student, who debated for a few minutes before McCarville handed the activist his business card. “Here,” he said. “Feel free to harass me anytime.” At the same time, female students complained in the early aughts of an atmosphere of male superiority and predation. “I understand that this is a man’s world,” reflected one junior in 2000, “but here I feel that I can only succeed if I do things the man’s way.”
That year, a group of students formed Princeton’s Organization of Women Leaders, or OWL, partially as a response to a recent sexual assault in the heart of campus. Having occurred under one of Princeton’s signature stone archways, it went largely unaddressed of by school administrators. “It felt necessary to have feminist proclamations . . . because there was still such an undercurrent of patriarchy,” an OWL member from Hegseth’s time told me. “He was a huge mouthpiece for all of that.” OWL leaders identified evidence of Princeton’s patriarchal and abusive campus culture, including details of their own stories of sexual harassment and assault. They also held public events on feminism, agitated for Princeton to buy rape kits, and supported a Take Back the Night march, a global event to protest violence against women that had its beginnings in the seventies.
In April 2018, Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, tore him to shreds over email, labeling her son an “abuser” who uses women for his “own power and ego.”
In 2001, the board of trustees appointed Princeton’s first female president, Shirley Tilghman. A Tory writer criticized her “monstrous” transformation of Princeton into a “Mommy University,” an environment, he claimed, that was too nurturing and emotional, with an administrative team “rife with X chromosomes.” Hegseth and the Tory also targeted OWL, often with angry outbursts of prudish revulsion. In February 2002, Hegseth became especially incensed when OWL helped mount a production of The Vagina Monologues. As part of the show’s promotion, students plastered pink posters around campus with sexually suggestive slogans, like “It’s 10 o’clock at night—do you know where your clitoris is?”
Hegseth responded with a coauthored screed in the student newspaper, charging that this band of feminist thespians had “violently hurled” a show that was little more than “pornography hidden under the cloak of artistic expression.” Around this time, OWL member Laura Petrillo caught Hegseth tearing down some posters for the show and called him out. He shot back with unsettling intensity. The former OWL member described Hegseth’s demeanor as “aggressive” and “antagonistic,” adding that he often used his military uniform as a sign of intimidation. “It really felt like he wanted to kill us.”
Hegseth and other Tory members also launched a phallic counteroperation, plastering campus with their own vulgar signs, but on blue paper. One simply read: my penis is furious, and it needs to shout. Hegseth’s posters prompted a letter to the paper from a philosophy major named Dan Wachtell. Labeling the Tory staff “misogynists,” Wachtell cut straight to the gonads, lamenting that Hegseth and his ilk didn’t watch the play with their ears and eyes open: “Who knows what then might have happened? Perhaps they even could have learned where the clitoris is.”
Two months later, Hegseth’s Tory published an inflammatory cover story entitled “Killing Feminism: OWL sabotages the women’s movement.” Written by then–managing editor Jennifer Carter, it’s a disjointed essay scolding OWL members for wearing risqué clothing and promoting sexual liberation. She also faults them for not “encouraging a more women-friendly campus dating scene”—when, in fact, they were trying to do just that. The Tory made many other boorish arguments in Hegseth’s days, including comparing gay marriage to pedophilia. Perhaps the most ghastly piece printed during Hegseth’s reign as publisher was an assertion that Princeton’s characterization of sex with an unconscious person as nonconsensual was an effort to “indoctrinate” students. “[If the] girl drank herself into unconsciousness,” the Tory argued, then there is “no duress.”
While these stories seem to foreshadow accusations that would later dog Hegseth’s career, his former friend said that back then Hegseth was “not some date rape, bro-y kinda guy.” In fact, the ex-friend insists, Hegseth didn’t even drink until he was twenty-one. Others have also said that in private settings Hegseth was curious, open-minded, even kind. One of his former female ROTC comrades told me that the program “had a lot of female cadets and female cadets in leadership while Pete was there, and I didn’t notice him treating female cadets any differently. He was professional and friendly and organized.” For all four years at Princeton, Hegseth also maintained his relationship with Schwarz, one which surely included him visiting her at Barnard, a Seven Sisters school and bastion of feminism.
The year after they graduated, Hegseth and Schwarz married at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Minnesota. They had fulfilled their yearbook prophecy, and yet Hegseth seemed to be disappearing into his military identity. There was clear evidence of this transformation at the wedding. While Schwarz donned a traditional white dress, Hegseth wore his formal Army blues.
Martial Bliss
Hegseth speaks about his military service with the sort of intoxicated emotion generally reserved for intimate relationships but, conversely, tends to describe personal bonds with the detachment of a battle-hardened soldier. In one recent podcast interview with former Navy SEAL and best-selling author Jack Carr, Hegseth revealed that it was only after he went overseas that humanity truly opened to him. “That was the real education, Jack, that was the real moment when you found yourself, where you understood human nature, fear, courage, love—all the deepest and rawest emotions that change you and forge you.” Compare this to Hegseth’s description of his mother, Penelope, as a “prayer warrior,” or his second wife, whom he described as “a total patriot” and “an absolute saint and trooper.”
Hegseth first got serious with his true love, the U.S. Army, at Guantánamo Bay. It was 2004, and he was overseeing detainees as part of the New Jersey National Guard. “It was a long year,” he told Carr. “At least there was a little bit of booze, but you can imagine how well that played sometimes.”
The National Guard is a particularly strange military structure, one that bifurcates life more than others. Its roots date back to the ad hoc militias of American Revolutionary skirmishes, and it is today composed of citizen soldiers, part-timers who drill one weekend a month, two weeks a year, then return home to their families and day jobs. Hegseth and Hester had this in common, although their civilian lives looked much different. When she wasn’t serving as a Raven, Hester managed a shoe store in a strip mall. Hegseth’s day job was as an equity markets analyst at Bear Stearns. Culturally, his two professions were not as far apart as they might seem. Wall Street firms are not unlike the Army or the National Guard—at least in a few respects. Both workplaces are marked by hard work alternating with hedonism and reckless sex, much of it inappropriate or predatory. “You’re so close to the people you work with, it blurs lines,” one former Bear banker told me. “I bet the divorce rate in military families and finance is very similar.”
Both finance and the military are also exceptionally hostile to women, and in similar ways. Specifically, men in both arenas tend to crudely sexualize women while simultaneously denigrating their ability to keep pace with men at work. In a 2016 New York Times op-ed, Maureen Sherry, a former managing director at Bear Stearns, writes that women at the firm were expected “to avoid stereotypical female behavior” and were discouraged from marrying or having kids. When Sherry herself returned from maternity leave and went to the nurse’s office with a breast pump, her male colleagues mooed. Later, on a dare, one banker drank a shot of her breast milk.
Amid this debauchery, news of the Iraq War was blaring from televisions and the pages of the Wall Street Journal. One morning, Hegseth was reading the Journal with his coffee when he came across a story of a suicide bombing in Baghdad that had killed eighteen children and a twenty-four-year-old American soldier. He tucked the newspaper clipping in his wallet—a reminder, he wrote in 2016, of the “stakes of our fight against Islam.” Hegseth’s emergent hatred of Islam was, like his misogyny, intense and compounded by alcohol. According to The New Yorker, he once ended a night of heavy drinking at a bar in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, by chanting, “Kill all Muslims.”
In the weeks after he read the Journal story, Hegseth pulled every string he could to get a slot in the 101st Airborne. His 2005 deployment wasn’t as intense as Hester’s, but he suggests it still changed him. He once said that after returning to New York in 2006, where he worked a bit longer as a banker, “I drank a lot trying to process what I had been through while dealing with a civilian world that frankly just didn’t seem to care.” He sometimes ghosted friends and stayed out late. “He had been my most reliable buddy until he got back from Iraq,” his old pal told me.
Such postdeployment struggles are tragically familiar. Hester wasn’t immune, either. “Back in the day, I reached for the bottle,” she told me. “But the answer never was in the bottom of it.” Troops are more likely to abuse alcohol than civilians, especially if they’ve seen combat. They have the highest divorce rate of any profession, and service members may also engage in more frequent domestic violence, though official data on this issue is elusive. A 1999 congressional dictate ordered the Department of Defense to collect and analyze data on domestic violence within their ranks. Two decades later, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Pentagon had grossly flouted the directive, securing only scattershot data that made it impossible to fully assess the problem.
Hegseth and Schwarz divorced in 2009, after he admitted to repeated infidelity. A friend of hers indicated to Vanity Fair that the marriage might have ended sooner had Hegseth not been so skilled at bifurcating his life and conjuring his prewar veneer. “[Schwarz] was gaslighted by him heavily,” she said. The next decade of Hegseth’s personal life was tumultuous. In 2010, within a year of finalizing his divorce, he married Samantha Deering, then a coworker at a pro-war astroturf group called Vets for Freedom, which was funded by a rogues’ gallery of conservative megadonors.
Hegseth once ended a night of heavy drinking at a bar in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, by chanting, “Kill all Muslims.”
The group’s advocacy seemed largely intended to obscure the war’s body count and silence its protesters. Hegseth and his colleagues grasped for evidence of progress in Iraq while casting any legitimate criticism as an affront to soldiers. During one 2007 American Veterans Center Conference panel, Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavia, Hegseth’s colleague and longtime confidant, expressed unbridled anger that public scrutiny was polluting his righteous war. “I take great offense to someone telling me about all the things that Blackwater contractors are doing, or one rape per five hundred thousand troops in Iraq,” Bellavia scoffed, adding that the D.C. establishment was actively ignoring the war’s many triumphs: “I can show them water turning into wine, and they won’t believe it.” Once the war became impossible to defend and after his departure from Vets for Freedom, Hegseth would pin many of its failures on women and other constituencies he deemed insufficiently “lethal”—an argument contravened by the self-evidently excessive lethality of the war on terror, in which American troops killed seven hundred thousand opposition fighters and civilians in the service of uncertain aims.
In 2009, Hegseth matriculated at Harvard’s Kennedy School, then was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. In 2012, after running an unsuccessful Senate bid against Amy Klobuchar, he joined another astroturf group, this one bankrolled by the Koch brothers and called Concerned Veterans for America. Hegseth carried their message of veteran health-care privatization to cities across America in what was called the Defend Freedom Tour. According to an internal email obtained by The New Yorker, Hegseth used pit stops as “little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.” He once brought his coworkers to a Louisiana strip club, got trashed, and tried to dance onstage. His behavior appears to have set the tone for the whole organization. Male staff repeatedly pursued their female colleagues, which, according to The New Yorker, they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” One of these women told me about numerous pickled work parties where Hegseth and his deputies were “treating women like pieces of meat.”
Hegseth was then also moving up the ranks at Fox News. In August 2017, while still married to Deering, Hegseth fathered a daughter with a Fox News producer named Jennifer Rauchet. Two months after that, he delivered remarks at the fortieth convention of the California Federation of Republican Women in Monterey. The record of his comments that evening isn’t available, though what happened later is less surprising than the fact that he deigned to speak at a women’s conference. After his speech, Hegseth hit the hotel bar, flirted with female attendees, and drank late into the night. At 1:30 a.m., hotel surveillance footage shows Hegseth arguing at the pool with a thirty-year-old Republican organizer about what she regarded as his inappropriate treatment of women, as she later told police. The woman said that she’d ended up in Hegseth’s room, and later suggested that she might have been drugged. She tried to leave, at which point he allegedly snatched her phone, blocked the door, and raped her. The incident was investigated by local police and referred to county prosecutors, who declined to pursue the case. Hegseth subsequently paid the woman a settlement, and both sides signed nondisclosure agreements.
His behavior during this period was well known to many of his friends and family. In April 2018, Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, tore him to shreds over email, labeling her son an “abuser” who uses women for his “own power and ego.” By her account, his warmer side seemed to have evaporated entirely. “Is there any sense of decency left in you?” she asked. In public, however, the family put on a united front. On Mother’s Day a year later, Fox News ran a surreal segment on Hegseth’s family that doubled as a sort of televised mediation. Hegseth appeared in studio with his parents, and Penelope was asked to recount what he was like as a kid.
“Pete was a spitfire,” she said, before quickly clarifying, “in a good way.” Tellingly, she could draw only on professional achievements, namely his academic prowess and military service. “Most of all, I love the way he loves his country,” she said. “I don’t know anyone who loves his country more than Pete.” At that point, the female Fox host pointed to a pink-and-peach bouquet on the table. “We have these beautiful flowers for you!” she said. Hegseth was taken aback. “Oh, are these for Mom?” He paused. “Mom, I got these for you,” he said, with a bemused smirk to the camera. “Just for you.”
Demoting Women
In 2019, Hegseth was married for the third time to Rauchet, the Fox News producer. Wedding photos show him in a white suit with a camouflage pocket square. They also feature his seven children and stepchildren, including five young boys: Gunner, Boone, Rex, Jackson, and Luke. Hegseth has publicly stated that he expects them all to join the military—specifically, to become certified killers, as Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, or Green Berets. Unlike his father, who avoided confrontation, Hegseth is severe and unsparing. “You are men,” he’s written to his boys. “Act like it.”
Hegseth has used his many perches, from Princeton to the Pentagon, to agitate for a kind of trickle-down masculinity.
The War on Warriors, published seven months before his ascension to secretary of defense, sketches out his theory for reinvigorating the military’s masculine ethos, often through aphorisms that could fit on a Ford F-350 bumper. Sprinkled in are longer myths, most of which have Hegseth or another aggrieved white guy at their center. They include the noncommissioned officer who called “bullshit” on unisex bathrooms for service members and was forced to apologize and the Green Beret who claims he was unfairly accused of touching a woman inappropriately when, in fact, he was simply helping her train on “leg tucks for the new PT test.” The military has become so woke, Hegseth writes, that it has diluted standards to allow women in combat while simultaneously kicking out “good soldiers for having naked women tattooed on their arms.” In his eyes, these pinup girls rendered in ink are the only women who belong on the front lines.
Hegseth’s uncompromising opposition to women in combat contrasts with the views of many military men, including Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL charged and later acquitted of violent war crimes. In an interview, Gallagher reckoned that women “have a place” on the battlefield. As he sees it, potential problems arise not out of a female inability but male misbehavior. “I have no doubt a woman can make it through BUD/S,” he said, referring to the ultragrueling six-month SEAL training course. “My concern is when she’s thrown into an operational unit, will that unit maintain or fall apart?” Gallagher worried that men would, due to their sense of honor, view women as the “top priority to protect”—or, conversely, that warrior units would debase women, leading to “a rise in sexual assault cases.”
Hegseth feels differently. A friend recalled that, during his Princeton ROTC days, he fretted that his female peers “didn’t have the ability, if he was shot, to pick him up and carry him off the battlefield. That rubbed him the wrong way.” Or perhaps his objections to Princeton’s female cadets stemmed from petty jealousy. In an uncanny foreshadowing of his Iraq War record, Hegseth earned a single, vague-sounding military award at his 2003 commencement, for “distinguished leadership,” while cadet Kathrin Conlin McWatters netted four commendations, including one named for legendary Defense Secretary George C. Marshall.
As he occupies Marshall’s former office, Hegseth is exacting his revenge by scrubbing public histories of female service members, squashing female leadership and integration programs, and disassembling the military’s sexual assault prevention programs. (In his unyielding quest to juice lethality, Hegseth also eliminated an Army office meant to minimize civilian casualties.) Hegseth has removed at least three top female military leaders and installed good old boys from his nonprofit party days. They include his top spokesman, Sean Parnell, who, during his intense 2021 custody battle, was accused by his estranged wife of domestic violence. Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, who has subsequently left his post, reportedly derailed an April meeting about veterans’ issues to recount a night spent in a D.C. strip club. Mix all this in with Hegseth’s sloppy Signalgate scandal, in which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was included in a group chat discussing war plans, and his personal brand of alpha-male lethality is baldly exposed as lacking substance, seriousness, or strategy. (That applies, as well, to his nonsensical ban on transgender troops, whom Trump accused of “expressing a false gender identity” in an executive order in January.)
Hegseth has used his many perches, from Princeton to the Pentagon, to agitate for a kind of trickle-down masculinity, laying any number of societal ills at the feet of women and arguing that a “tough, manly, and unapologetically lethal” military is the only way to ensure future generations “live in an America that honors God, cherishes freedom, celebrates families, and lives in peace.” And yet Hegseth himself exudes at least one trait not usually included among the masculine ideals: vanity. He loves posting his workouts on social media; loves accenting his musculature with ink; loves his tight, tailored suits. In April, he ordered the installation of a makeup studio next to the Pentagon’s pressroom. CBS News reported that, in a cost-reduction measure, Hegseth would be “doing his own makeup ahead of TV appearances, not paying for a makeup artist.” It makes sense that Hegseth knows his way around a powder brush. He’s always been aware of the gift that is his face—how to use it, and what to hide.