When Pete Hegseth was an earnest, young Army lieutenant in Iraq in 2005, he was cleareyed on how he viewed crimes committed by soldiers in war.
Soldiers in his own infantry company in Iraq in 2006 had shot civilians, executed prisoners and tried to cover up the crimes.
“Those are a no-brainer,” he told an audience at the University of Virginia after his deployment. He called the acts of those soldiers, who served in a sister platoon in his company, “atrocities” and added: “Of course that’s wrong. No one is here to defend that.”
By the end of his Army career, though, he was repeatedly doing exactly that.
As a presenter on Fox News, he portrayed other troops charged with war crimes as “heroes.” The military prosecuting them was, he said, “throwing warriors under the bus.” The once circumspect officer glossed over crucial details, told his TV audience that troops were just “doing the job they were hired to do” and pushed relentlessly for President Donald J. Trump to intervene.
It was a stark shift for the man President-elect Trump picked this month to lead the Defense Department. Soldiers who served with Mr. Hegseth say the change was driven in part by a string of military deployments — once to Guantánamo Bay, once to Iraq and once to Afghanistan — that each taught him a new lesson in military dysfunction.
The experience transformed him from a neoconservative believer in U.S. military might into an outsider so distrustful of the national security establishment that he repeatedly sided with convicted murderers over Pentagon leadership.
“He’s a product of these broken wars, and pretty much our whole generation feels the same way,” Mathew Golsteyn said in an interview with The New York Times. Mr. Golsteyn, a former Army Green Beret, was charged with murdering a captive he believed was a Taliban bomb maker in Afghanistan, and appeared several times on Fox with Mr. Hegseth.
The military leadership “sent us repeatedly into a hornets’ nest with no plan,” Mr. Golsteyn added. “They gave us an impossible job, then blamed us when things went wrong.”
Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation is far from certain, as he faces questions over character. On Wednesday, the City of Monterey, Calif., released a redacted police file containing the accusation of an unnamed woman who said that Mr. Hegseth raped her at a Republican women’s convention in 2017, an allegation that Mr. Hegseth has adamantly said was an episode of consensual sex. In addition, he left the National Guard after another soldier reported him as a possible “insider threat,” citing some of Mr. Hegseth’s tattoos, which can be associated with white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
His views on how the military should conduct itself are also likely to be scrutinized during Senate hearings unless Mr. Trump manages to make him a recess appointment. Beyond Mr. Hegseth’s divisive perspective on certain war crimes cases, some of his public statements on who belongs in military and in what roles are outside the mainstream, including positions against allowing women to serve in combat.
Mr. Hegseth, 44, did not respond to requests for comment.
In Washington, many are concerned not only that Mr. Hegseth may be a partisan bomb thrower set on politicizing the military, but also that, as a former part-time National Guard officer with minimal managerial skills, he is not qualified to run a department with nearly three million employees. Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a former Army Ranger, echoed the views of many in a video last week, calling Mr. Hegseth “woefully unqualified.”
But Mr. Hegseth’s views reflect a disillusionment among a segment of post-9/11 service members, and a slice of the broader public, about how the military is used. Mr. Trump tapped into that anger, promising a more inward-looking foreign policy and a hands-off approach to prosecuting soldiers.
That is why several veterans who served with Mr. Hegseth said they were thrilled with his nomination. Most of those interviewed said they hoped the fact that he did not follow a traditional path to the office, through the upper ranks of the Pentagon and jobs in the defense industry, could help him understand the burdens placed on rank-and-file troops and redirect the military’s priorities.
Others see it differently. They say battlefield rules prevent missions from spiraling into chaos and protect troops from some of the moral pitfalls inherent in combat.
The number of troops charged with illegal killings in Iraq or Afghanistan is minuscule, and military leaders vehemently dispute the notion that such prosecutions were unfair or capricious. They fear having someone at the very top of the chain who does not understand that failing to hold people accountable for the few incidents of war crimes virtually guarantees more of them.
‘Long, Boring Duty’
Mr. Hegseth grew up in Minnesota and joined the Army R.O.T.C. months before the terrorist attacks in 2001, while majoring in politics at Princeton University.
While there, Mr. Hegseth was the publisher of the campus conservative journal, The Princeton Tory, where he wrote culture-war polemics on topics like modern feminism and homosexuality. In one 2003 column, he defended the invasion of Iraq as a triumph for neoconservatism, saying it showed that “conservative ideas have worked, do work and will continue to work.”
After graduating, he was employed on Wall Street when he was deployed in 2004 to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and led a platoon of soldiers from the New Jersey National Guard who worked guard towers and perimeter security at prisons that were hastily set up and held more than 600 terrorism suspects.
He was organized, hard-working and liked by the troops, said Nicholas Forrestal, now with the New Jersey State Police, who was a staff sergeant with the unit. Mr. Hegseth was “a driven guy,” Mr. Forrestal said. “A great soldier, a great leader.”
Guarding the perimeter was, Mr. Hegseth later said in one of his books, a “long, boring duty.” But Guantánamo gave him an early view of Pentagon malaise, as the system set up to hold detainees and prosecute terrorists by military commission congealed into a morass of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that, 20 years later, has led to almost no convictions.
Mr. Hegseth was there at a pivotal time, when prisoners were able to consult with lawyers for the first time in two or more years of detention, a right granted to them by the Supreme Court. Also that year, the Pentagon charged a few first prisoners in the disappointing military commission system.
Mr. Hegseth lamented that the prisoners sometimes seemed to get better treatment than his soldiers, and later on Fox News called Guantánamo “a prison without a mission.”
“It got mucked up very early when left-wing lawyers and other protections came in,” he said. “It could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try and, you know, execute, because we are in a war.”
Impossible Decisions
After Guantánamo, Mr. Hegseth returned to Wall Street but was there only a few months when reports of increasing violence in Iraq prompted him to volunteer in 2005 for a deployment with the 187th Infantry Regiment of the Army’s storied 101st Airborne Division.
Iraq left deep marks on Mr. Hegseth. He arrived after the optimism of the invasion had curdled into bloody sectarian fighting. As a young lieutenant who had never seen combat, he was thrown into a frenetic schedule of nighttime helicopter raids where, soldiers say, he had to navigate faulty intelligence, contradictory orders and edicts from Washington that often made little sense on the ground.
Soldiers in his company said military lawyers warned that they could not shoot at Iraqis unless the Iraqis were actively pointing weapons at U.S. troops. Conversely, the brigade leadership told them at times to fire on nearly any military-age male.
“It was a nightmare for the soldier on the ground,” said Eric Geressy, the first sergeant in Mr. Hegseth’s company. “You have conflicting orders, rules that changed constantly and no clear guidance from headquarters. He had to make impossible decisions and set the example for those soldiers.”
Mr. Hegseth’s company was aggressive — so much so that it kept a running tally of kills in its headquarters that, Mr. Hegseth later said, included civilians. But Mr. Hegseth said he actively pushed back against superiors and urged his platoon to use restraint and fire warning shots to save lives.
By being too aggressive, he said in a 2009 discussion of the deployment, “you’re hurting yourself a lot more than you are helping yourself. Even if you’ve killed five bad guys, if you’ve killed two innocents, you’ve set yourself back more than you’ve moved forward.”
On several raids, Mr. Hegseth insisted on being the first through the door so he could prevent young soldiers from making bad calls that could unintentionally lead to a massacre, Mr. Geressy said.
On one of those raids, the young lieutenant went after a suspected insurgent leader, but intelligence sent the platoon to the wrong house. Because they entered with no shots fired, Mr. Hegseth was able to talk to the residents, who led them to the correct house, just a few blocks away, said Mr. Geressy, who was there. The platoon was able to nab the target without a shot.
“Pete was by the book, levelheaded, flawless,” Mr. Geressy said.
Embitterment Sets In
Mr. Hegseth left the platoon halfway through the deployment for an assignment to help create a local town council and build infrastructure in the city of Samarra that could help bring peace and stability — realizing, he said later, that it was impossible “to kill and capture our way out of this war.”
The Army awarded Mr. Hegseth a Bronze Star for meritorious service after the deployment. He eventually earned another in Afghanistan. He does not have any awards for valor under fire.
Shortly after he left his infantry company, it was involved in a raid that went bad. An extensive investigation ensued, and four soldiers were charged with executing captives.
Still believing that the military was on the right track, Mr. Hegseth returned home and in 2007 helped build an organization called Vets for Freedom, which pushed for increased military involvement that could bring stability to Iraq.
During that time, prosecutions against the soldiers from his Iraq deployment moved forward swiftly.
By 2011, Mr. Hegseth had left Wall Street and returned to Minnesota, where he was a captain in the Minnesota National Guard. He volunteered to go to Afghanistan to train Afghan Army officers in counterinsurgency tactics at a school in Kabul.
“We are doing everything possible to build an Afghan Army that will outlast us,” he wrote at the outset.
An Army officer who taught with him said he genuinely cared about the mission. But the officer, who asked not to be named because he is still in uniform, said by the time they arrived in 2011, the U.S. military was in a hurry to pull out. The counterinsurgency school had been operating since 2007, but Mr. Hegseth’s mission was to teach one of the last classes, then turn the school over to the Afghans in 2012.
Soon after, the school shut down.
In the years after, Mr. Hegseth became increasingly bitter, reflecting the opinions of many veterans of that era, who said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting.
His view of war crimes cases changed from “no-brainer” condemnation to a conviction that the execution of the wars was so flawed that only luck had saved him and many of his friends from facing murder charges.
After making regular appearances on cable news for years, Mr. Hegseth was hired by Fox News in 2014. In many ways his segments there rehashed the same culture-war conservatism he had been writing about since Princeton, but he added a new topic: war crimes.
A Shift on War Crimes
Starting in 2018, Mr. Hegseth repeatedly showcased on Fox the cases of service members he said had been wrongly accused of murder after making quick decisions in the fog of war. “As a war fighter, you assume that your military will have your back,” he said in one 2019 segment. “Instead, they come after you.”
The cases varied, but none involved the split-second decisions he often described. And none involved the four convicted in his own company from Iraq.
Most of the accused service members had executed captives after the shooting had stopped. Some, including Lt. Clint Lorance of the Army and Edward Gallagher, a member of the Navy SEALs, were turned in by fellow platoonmates who believed what they had witnessed was deeply wrong. But Mr. Hegseth distilled all of them into easily digestible grievance.
In the years after Mr. Hegseth’s deployments, his personal life grew more complicated. In August 2017, a Fox producer gave birth to his child and his second wife filed for divorce the next month. That October, the police in Monterey received the report from the woman claiming sexual assault.
His view of the wars, however, was increasingly simple: Give the soldier on the ground the benefit of the doubt.
Mr. Golsteyn, the former Green Beret who admitted to killing a detainee, said that Mr. Hegseth’s championing of the accused sometimes went too far, but that the Fox presenter was one of the few people willing to question his prosecution.
Mr. Golsteyn said in some instances, including his own, the failures of upper leadership had left troops on the ground with only wrong choices. In 2010, he had captured a suspected Taliban bomb maker, but legal requirements from top leadership dictated that the man be released.
Mr. Golsteyn had to choose between freeing a man who he thought was likely to kill many other people, or defying Army rules and shooting him. Mr. Golsteyn later admitted in a job interview for the C.I.A. and on Fox News that he had chosen the latter. The Army charged him with murder in 2018.
“In so many of these cases, guilt, innocence, completely misses the point,” Mr. Golsteyn said. “I think because of what Pete experienced, he could see that.”
The Army is less ambivalent. It sets rules of engagement that dictate when troops can use lethal force, and sees intentionally violating those rules as murder. Individual soldiers do not have license to be judge, jury and executioner.
On Fox, Mr. Hegseth appealed directly to President Trump to intervene. On at least one occasion, the two discussed the cases in person. In 2019, Mr. Trump stepped in, overruling the recommendations of leaders at the Pentagon in four cases. Murder charges against Mr. Golsteyn were dropped.
The president left little doubt whom to credit. Announcing his review of Mr. Golsteyn’s case, he said on Twitter: “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!@PeteHegseth.”
In 2021, Mr. Hegseth was barred from a security mission at President Biden’s inauguration over concerns in his Guard unit that some of his Christian-themed tattoos suggested he was a white supremacist and potential extremist. He left the National Guard in 2024.
Now he is poised to oversee the military branch that he says forced him out for being a potential threat.
“They can target me — I don’t give a damn,” Mr. Hegseth wrote this month on social media. “But this type of targeting of Christians, conservatives, patriots and everyday Americans will stop on DAY ONE at DJT’s DoD.”
The post The Metamorphosis of Pete Hegseth: From Critic of War Crimes to Defender of the Accused appeared first on New York Times.
