Senator wounded in helicopter crash rips ‘unqualified’ Pete Hegseth for stance on women in combat

A US senator and combat veteran who lost both of her legs in a helicopter crash in Iraq has slammed Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense for his stance on women in combat roles.

Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host picked by Trump for the Pentagon, is a combat veteran himself. In an interview on a podcast several weeks ago, Hegseth claimed that allowing women to serve in combat roles — like Duckworth — was not providing any benefits to the armed services and argued it was making warfare more “complicated.”

“Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat, means casualties are worse,” Hegseth said. “I’m straight up just saying that 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.”

Access to all combat roles in the US military was expanded to women by Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2014, authorized by then-President Barack Obama.

Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois, tore into Hegseth during an interview on CBS News’s Face the Nation on Sunday.

“Mr. Hegseth is not qualified for the position because he doesn’t understand apparently, even after having served, that women are actually vitally important to an effective military,” she said. “With the recruiting challenges we’re having right now, if we were to pull all those women out and say, you can’t go into combat, we would face a severe personnel crisis in the military.”

She then targeted his military record: “He was a pretty low-ranking guy in the military, and he never had a command position … He was a platoon leader, I think, once or twice, but he never even commanded a company. And so this is a man who is inordinately unqualified for the position.”

Duckworth retired from the military after being one of the first women to fly combat missions during the Iraq War; her rank upon retiring was lieutenant colonel. Hegseth retired at the rank of major.

The scuffle over Hegseth’s past comments is likely to take center stage in the coming days as he becomes the Trump Cabinet nominee facing the most scrutiny from both senators who will determine the fate of his confirmation as well as reporters, who have begun digging into an allegation of sexual assault for which Hegseth was not charged criminally.

Hegeseth later settled with his accuser in a civil case. He has denied any wrongdoing, and claimed that a sexual encounter with his accuser was consensual.

Trump’s transition team, already dealt a blow by the withdrawal of Matt Gaetz from contention for attorney general, was reportedly “blindsided” by the release this week of a largely-redacted police report detailing two accounts of the encounter between Hegseth and his accuser.

Gaetz pulled out of the running to lead the Justice Department on Thursday; his announcement, according to CNN, came 45 minutes after the news channel’s reporters contacted him for comment on the revelation that the House Ethics Committee had heard testimony about a second alleged sexual encounter between the ex-congressman and a 17-year-old high schooler at a drug-fueled party in 2017.

Like Hegseth, Gaetz strongly denies the allegations.