‘Absolutely Clueless’: Tammy Duckworth Blasts Pete Hegseth and Senate GOP
The Department of Defense is the largest employer in the United States, sending out paychecks to 2.1 million service members and more than 770,000 civilians. Its annual budget — $900 billion dollars — is larger than the GDP of Switzerland. With an estimated 750 bases in at least 80 countries, it is sprawling, extraordinarily complex organization. And, to run it, Donald Trump picked a Fox News haircut with (an alleged) drinking problem.
It’s hard to emphasize just how wildly unqualified Pete Hegseth is for the top job at the Pentagon — but at his Senate Armed Services committee hearing on Tuesday, Hegseth did a pretty good job of making the argument himself. “Over and over again, he said, ‘Oh, I’m not that experienced, but I’m going to hire people smarter than myself to do this,’” says Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a member of the committee. “And that the whole day, I was thinking, ‘Then why don’t we just hire somebody smarter than you for the job?’”
Asked by Duckworth to name the three international security negotiations that the Secretary of Defense personally leads on behalf of the United States, Hegseth balked. “…NATO?” he offered, lamely. In case you’re curious, they are: a Status of Forces Agreement, which delineates how military personnel can operate inside another county (Korea, for instance); an Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement, a type of treaty that pertains to shared logistics (a security agreement the U.S. has with countries like Latvia); and a Defense Trade Cooperation Treaties, which relates to moving or sharing equipment (like the nuclear submarine deal hatched by the U.S., U.K. and Australia).
In his opening statement, Hegseth spoke about the importance of deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. A key component of the Trump administration’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific was a reliance on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. Duckworth recalled, “I thought, okay, great… I’m going to lob him some softballs, right?” She went on to ask if he could name the countries in ASEAN, or even how many there were.
“I know we have allies in South Korea and Japan, and in AUKUS with Australia,” Hegseth offered — none of which are members of association. (For the record, ASEAN is made up of 10 South Asian countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.)
“The man is absolutely clueless,” Duckworth assesses bluntly to Rolling Stone. A woman and a combat veteran who lost both legs in Iraq, Duckworth voted to confirm both Mark Esper and James Mattis, Trump’s nominees for Secretary of Defense in his first term. Even as she disagreed politically with Esper, Duckworth says, “He was competent and he could do his job, and he could go to Singapore, to [the Asian Defense Summit], the Shangri-La Dialogue, and go toe-to-toe with the Chinese defense secretary — and, I’m sorry, but Hegseth is not going to be able to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese defense secretary, and think that he’s going to gee-shucks smile his way out of that type of a situation.”
Duckworth will not be supporting Hegseth’s nomination, which she says sends a chilling message not just to men and women in the U.S. military, but to other nations as well.
”It says that we don’t care about their lives,” Duckworth says. “We ask our servicemen and women to be tactically proficient, technically proficient, so that they can do their jobs under any conditions — even under fire, even as you’re dying and bleeding to death, our troops are going to fight back, because they are trained to carry out the mission. And yet to have a secretary of defense that’s going to make decisions that will commit their lives to defending America, who doesn’t understand how to negotiate the best deal? It is really scary.”
At the same time that Hegseth was displaying a woefully inadequate grasp of the basic contours of the job he wants, he was also blithely threatening to fire the admirals and generals currently serving in the Pentagon. If that happens, Duckworth says, service members will be the ones who bear the burden: “All of the top leadership — with the experience, who can tactically plan a combat operation — are going to be gone, and you’re gonna have a bunch of hacks who have never commanded anything more than 200 personnel, who are gonna decide whether or not you go fight in Greenland or Panama, wherever. It’s really demoralizing.”
Her Republican colleagues appear, nonetheless, ready to confirm Hegseth, she says. “We have a Republican Party in the Senate that is on its knees in front of Donald Trump, and not a single one of them are willing to stand up — at least not on the Armed Services Committee.”
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