Senator Tammy Duckworth reveals her strategy for questioning Pete Hegseth

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week for a high-stakes and often contentious confirmation hearing.

Many Democrats focused on Hegseth’s personal controversies and his past allegations of misconduct, which he vigorously denied, or his past comments against women serving in combat, which he walked back.

But some of the most striking and revealing exchanges took place with Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq War veteran who served in combat as a helicopter pilot. When Duckworth asked him to name one of the deals the defense secretary personally negotiates, he couldn’t name one. He also could not name a country that is a member of ASEAN, an intergovernmental association of 10 Southeast Asian countries that includes key U.S. military allies.

“He also spoke at length about not lowering standards for anyone. And yet, as far as I know, this hearing was all about him asking us to lower the standards for him,” Duckworth said in an interview with The 19th.

Much criticism of Hegseth has surrounded the confidential settlement he paid to a woman who accused him of raping her in 2017 and earlier accusations of mismanagement of an alumni nonprofit fighters. At the hearing, Hegseth said he was falsely accused of assault during an encounter he called consensual and dismissed the other allegations as “anonymous smears.”

After the hearing, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who has worked to combat sexual assault in the military and participated in the closely watched vote on Hegseth, came to seek her confirmation. Republicans control the Senate, and the Armed Services Committee plans to vote on Hegseth’s confirmation Monday, making him defense secretary as early as the middle of next week.

Duckworth said she came to the hearing perhaps most concerned about Hegseth’s qualifications and knowledge. She said in a speech Thursday that she did not oppose her nomination on partisan grounds: She supported Trump’s previous picks to lead the Pentagon, including Gen. James Mattis and Mark Esper, because she thought that they were qualified.

Hegseth lacks the traditional management experience of previous Defense Department leaders, a job that involves overseeing a roughly $850 billion budget and 3.4 million personnel. Hegseth, who served in the U.S. National Guard, most recently served as co-host of “Fox & Friends” weekends. At Tuesday’s hearing, Hegseth presented himself as an outsider and a force for much-needed change, ready to shake things up. In his opening statement, Hegseth said he would “bring back the warrior culture” to the Pentagon and would compensate for his lack of experience by hiring “smarter and more capable people than me” to work under him.

“As this goes on, I’m like, ‘Why don’t you just hire someone who’s smarter than you to do the job?’ If you’re going to hire all these people smarter than you to help you do the job, let’s just cut out the middlemen,” Duckworth said.

Duckworth asked Hegseth about things that the Secretary of Defense cannot delegate to anyone else and must personally negotiate and sign: status of forces agreements, acquisition and cross-service agreements, and defense commercial cooperation treaties. She has traditionally led the congressional delegation to the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual Asia-Pacific defense summit, and watched other secretaries negotiate in real time.

“I’ve watched Mattis, and I’ve watched (current Defense Secretary Lloyd) Austin, and I’ve seen Esper confront the Chinese defense secretary at these international forums,” she said . “And I said to myself, ‘This man can’t take on the Communist Chinese Defense Secretary, he’ll be eaten alive.'”

Duckworth asked Hegseth about the highest level of international security negotiation he had participated in, and he responded that he had not been in government since his military service. She then asked him to name one of the three main types of such agreements.

“If you talk about defense deals, NATO could be one,” he said.

“The status of forces agreement would be one,” she said.

“I was involved in teaching on the status of forces agreements in Afghanistan,” he said.

“But you don’t think about talking about it?” she replied. “You are not qualified, Mr. Hegseth.”

“It’s basic stuff, 101, for someone who wants to be secretary of defense, and he couldn’t answer any of them,” Duckworth later said. “That’s how I got to my line of questioning. Actually, it wasn’t something I had planned in advance. It was just really driven by his responses and his statements.

His question on ASEAN also stemmed from Hegseth’s own statements during the hearing. He referenced the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which highlights the importance of ASEAN to Trump’s first-term strategy for the Indo-Pacific region, a key sphere of influence for the United States in the fight against China and a subject Duckworth had hoped to address during his tenure. seven minutes of interrogation.

So she asked Hegseth to “at least name the importance of the ASEAN nations and what kind of agreement the United States has with them” and how many nations make up ASEAN.

“I can’t give you the exact number,” Hegseth said, instead listing other key U.S. military allies, like South Korea and Japan, as well as the AUKUS agreement that the U.S. United States concluded with the United Kingdom and Australia.

“Mr. Hegseth, none of the three countries you mentioned are part of ASEAN,” she said. “I suggest you do some homework before preparing for these types of negotiations.”

Excerpts of Duckworth’s exchanges with Hegseth gained traction online after the hearing. Her questions weren’t meant to create a viral moment or a trap, she said, but to press Hegseth on basic but crucial aspects of the job.

“I think that’s why it resonated, because it became very clear that this man was not qualified to do this job,” she said. “And it has become very clear around the world that this man is not qualified to do this job. When you cannot name a major treaty ally, like the Philippines, where we have made basic agreements from time to time; when you can’t name Thailand, our oldest allied ally for 190 years; when you can’t name Singapore where we have an air base, are you kidding me?

His interrogation received applause across the board. Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House official turned Trump critic and current co-host of ABC’s “The View,” said she thought Duckworth had the best approach of all the Democrats on the panel. .

“I thought Tammy Duckworth was the most effective because she challenged him on the facts and the job tasks, and he didn’t succeed,” Griffin said on the show Wednesday. “I attended the ASEAN summit, I can name the countries participating in it, and I am unfortunately not qualified to be secretary of defense.”

In her speech Thursday and at the hearing, Duckworth spoke in front of a copy of Soldier’s Creed, which she said hung above her desk in the Senate and hung above her desk at Walter Reed Medical Center when she was treated for injuries she had sustained. suffered in combat, including the loss of both legs and some mobility in his right arm after Iraqi insurgents struck his Black Hawk helicopter with a grenade in 2004.

“Part of being a leader is knowing when you’re not competent enough to do the job,” she said on the field. “Well, Mr. Hegseth, you are not technically competent. You are not tactically competent. And your nomination is an insult to those brave enough to serve our nation. So you, sir, are banned from this station.