What Pete Hegseth Has Said About Women Serving in the Military

Donald Trump’s nomination for defense secretary Pete Hegseth has faced some backlash for comments he has made about women in combat.
The president-elect announced his choice for the position on Tuesday night, to the surprise of some Republicans, calling Hegseth “tough, smart and a true believer in America First.”
In CNN’s coverage of the announcement, it showed a clip of Hegseth, an Army combat veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and also a Fox News host, saying: “I’m straight up saying we should not have women in combat roles.”
A snippet of this clip has been shared multiple times on X. Newsweek has contacted teams for Trump and Hegseth for comment, via email, outside of normal working hours.
Hegseth made the comment while speaking on the podcast, The Shawn Ryan Show, last week, to promote his new book The War on Warriors.
“I’m straight up just saying we shouldn’t have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, it hasn’t made us more lethal, it has made fighting more complicated,” Hegseth said.
He added: “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 traditionally, not traditionally, over human history, men in those positions are more capable.”
Before this, Hegseth had argued that his position was about maintaining the standards of military units.
He said: “You had women truck drivers… or mechanics on these convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then they’d be ambushed or hit by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and suddenly you have women in combat—that’s maybe a modern reality in a 360 battlefield, that’s different than intentionally saying ‘we’re gonna put women into combat roles so they will do the combat roles of men,’ knowing that we’ve changed the standards in putting them there, which means you’ve changed the capability of that unit.
“And if you say you haven’t, you’re a liar. Because everybody knows, between bone density and lung capacity and muscle strength, men and women are just different.”
“I’m OK with the idea that you maintain the standards where they are, for everybody, and if there’s some hard-charging female that meets that standard, great,” Hegseth added.
He cited a 2015 U.S. Marine Corps study which concluded that “the integration of females… will add a level of risk in performance/effectiveness and cost” after finding that certain all-male military units performed better than integrated ones.
The study was not accepted by some, with lobby group Women in International Security calling its research methods “fundamentally flawed.”
Trump has announced a slew of additional choices for his second administration since his landslide election victory last week.
On Tuesday, the president-elect picked Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and John Ratcliffe—former Texas congressman and national intelligence chief during Trump’s first administration—as CIA director, among others.
Correction 11/13/24 10:30 a.m.: This article has been updated to show that Hegseth said that women in combat could be hit by IEDs.