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Pete Hegseth’s nomination to lead the Pentagon is, at the moment, the most endangered of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet choices. Hegseth’s hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday—among the first of the incoming Administration—could offer some clarity on whether the former Fox News host is still on track to lead the nation’s largest employer.
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Central to that debate is likely to be Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat on the committee who happens to be disabled combat veteran who lost both of her legs when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the Army Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting in Iraq. Duckworth is among the first women to have flown combat missions. Hegseth says women have no place in combat operations. “I’m straight up just saying 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,” Hegseth said in November before he was nominated. That position is among a host of past comments that have come to dog Hegseth’s nomination to be Defense Secretary—along with a raft of allegations about alcohol, women, and mismanagement.
“He’s not qualified for the job,” Duckworth told TIME Monday evening ahead of Hegseth’s confirmation hearing. She points to not only his background, but his positions on issues like women in the military. “We could not go to war and keep America safe if we were to keep our female service members out of combat or areas of combat,” she says.
Below are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.
TIME: Based on what you know at this hour, is Mr. Hegseth qualified?
Duckworth: Based on what I know so far, no. I was not afforded the opportunity to meet with him in person, either.
I understand there was a scheduling conflict there.
Oh, no, there’s no scheduling conflict. I have the receipts. I have an email dated Dec. 18 where his team gives me the date of the week of Jan. 19. He was never planning on meeting with the Democrats prior to this. And we’ve made ourselves more than available. So whatever they’re telling you is a fib.
I went back through your voting record from the first Trump term. You have not been an automatic rejector of his Cabinet. Why is this nomination different?
He’s not qualified for the job. The largest organization that this man has led, best I can tell, was a 40-person platoon—if that was a fully manned-up platoon. The largest budget that I can tell that he has managed was somewhere around $16 or $18 million. And even that was in financial distress while he was in charge of it. We’re talking about a 3 million personnel organization, military and civilian, and a budget this year of $825 billion. The manager of the local Applebee’s has managed more people than Mr. Hegseth has. And I would no more want that person in charge of the Pentagon than I would Mr. Hegseth.
You’ve served in combat as a woman. Can you explain what a Secretary Hegseth would mean for folks like yourself?
It’s not just about me as a woman serving. It’s the fact that he’s not qualified for the job. The military, what I love about it is that it’s a pure meritocracy. Can you do the job? Can you meet the standards? If you can’t fly the helicopter, you don’t get to be a helicopter pilot. Yet here’s a guy who can’t meet the standards and is asking for special dispensation to do a job that he’s not qualified to do. And so what does that say to the women who’ve earned their position? What does it say to the team leader, the company commander, or the brigade commander who has earned that position, to look and see there’s a guy there who’s a weekend talk show host who has no experience, and now he gets to do the job? It undermines the meritocracy and the very foundation on which the military trains and executes its mission.
You’re a retired member of the military now. You’re on the Senate Armed Services Committee. You’ve seen the effects of DEI programs that Mr. Hegseth has made one of the cornerstones of his candidacy here. Do they hurt national security in the way he says?
Not at all. Diversity is one of the greatest strengths of our military. You could just look at things like The Lionesses, right? The Marine Corps’s women who formed units after it was found out that they could better get information on enemy actions from Afghan women villagers because they would talk to them. When we were in Iraq, especially in the early days of the war, we were attaching women who were supply clerks or medics to infantry units as they’re going to kick down doors looking for insurgents, because then the women were there and they could actually frisk the local women who could not be examined by our male counterparts. Having people within the ranks from all different perspectives and backgrounds with language abilities makes our military more diverse and stronger and more able to defend America.
I wish Mr. Hegseth would focus on our adversaries and the needs of the military and less on being a culture warrior. This seems to be all that he’s talking about when we don’t have enough battleships and the Chinese are building more and more submarines to rival our submarine force. He’s worried about renaming a military base for the worst generals in the Confederate war. It’s, like, where are you focused, buddy?
Those are tangible experiences of women in combat or combat-adjacent roles who actually made the United States safer. Why would there be a downside to that?
The nature of modern warfare and the nature of the United States military is one that we could not go to war and keep America safe if we were to keep our female service members out of combat or areas of combat. In Iraq, over 50% of the casualties that we took in Operation Iraqi Freedom happened not when we were kicking down doors. It actually happened during convoy operations. Women have been driving vehicles in the military since the first World War. So if we were to take all of the females out of those convoy operations, they would never have happened. This is not like the Civil War, the Revolutionary War where we have a forward line of troops someplace and everybody stands behind it, and you can keep the women back 30 miles or 50 miles. That’s not how war works today.
He is completely out of touch with the realities of modern warfare and our military. So what does he want to do? Keep the women from being deployed completely? So that’s 20% of the force that can’t deploy. Does that mean that the men have to deploy more often? It’s going to make our military unable to execute the mission.
Is there any way you get to yes on him?
Maybe he has hidden talents I don’t know about. Maybe he’s run a major multinational corporation. Maybe he actually has negotiated a major diplomatic agreement with a foreign military. Maybe he just is being very, very, shy and not telling us about it.
Can Democrats stop this, though?
I don’t know. Unfortunately, if you’d asked me this a month ago, I would’ve said there are certainly Republican members who care enough about the military and the ability to secure our nation and provide for national security who would step up. But unfortunately, the ones who did speak up with anything other than enthusiastic support from Mr. Hegseth immediately came under extremely volatile attack from everybody from President Trump down to his MAGA base. I know [Sen.] Joni Ernst [of Iowa] certainly faced an onslaught of attacks. My understanding is that many of these attacks were very threatening to her physical security. I don’t know what my Republican colleagues are going to do, whether they’re going to choose to put country over self, or MAGA over country.
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