Pete Hegseth unleashes his ‘warrior culture’ on the world

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, has the US Secretary of War broken the law?

0:17He put highly classified plans to bomb Yemen on a group chat. How a reporter from the Atlantic was added to a group chat discussing upcoming military strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen. He believes American soldiers shouldn't always be bound by the Geneva Convention. We follow rules, but we don't need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars. He thinks it's funny to post memes about military strikes. He ordered executions of Venezuelans in the sea, reportedly insisting they kill everybody, even when the survivors who were seen clinging onto a boat could pose no threat.

0:56He sunk the boat, sunk the boat and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back. Pete Hegseth is what happens when the president is Donald Trump. When a former Fox News talk show host can hold one of the most powerful jobs in the world, U.S. Secretary of Defense, in charge of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Coast Guard, the Pentagon. But this isn't just an over-promotion that could go badly wrong for the White House. Pete Hegseth is on a mission to push his vision of American warrior culture on the world. From The Guardian, I'm Narsin Iqbal.

1:45Today in Focus, a dramatic shift in US foreign policy and the man behind it.

1:58Joseph Jeddian, you're a breaking news reporter for The Guardian US based in Washington, which means you're first on the politics beat. Can we go back a little bit in Pete Hegseth's story? And can you tell me what we know of where he came from to be where he is now? Absolutely. So Pete Hegseth's story, it starts pretty typical Midwestern USA. He's born in Minneapolis, raised in a small Minnesota town called Forest Lake. His dad, Brian, spent over four decades in public education. He was a basketball coach, retired only a couple of years ago. His mother still is an executive business coach who taught with the Minnesota Excellence in Public Service Series, which is, you know, for Republican and center-right women.

2:43Back then, you'd call that a pretty stable middle-class background. Hexeth was actually the valedictorian of his high school in 1999. So academically, pretty strong from early on. Where it gets interesting is he goes to Princeton, studies politics, plays basketball, becomes the editor of a conservative paper there. And he goes to get his master's in public policy from Harvard Kennedy. So we're talking serious Ivy League credentials, which makes his trajectory so unusual, especially for Secretary of War. After college, he's commissioned as an officer on the Army ROTC. So he was a reserves officer.

3:26He joined the National Guard. He had deployments in a few places. He went to Guantanamo Bay. He was in Iraq. He was in Afghanistan. He was a platoon leader when he was in Baghdad. And he ended up in Afghanistan in around 2011. According to his books. He taught counterinsurgency tactics in Kabul. So, you know, there's no question that he has some deployment experience. What does it mean to join the National Guard? How is that different from like being recruited into the US Army, if it is at all? The National Guard is a program really for younger people who are interested in having a career in the military, but it is still a civilian position.

4:07Usually what you'll find in National Guard, most people are 18, 19, 20, 21 years old. So it is a very early career position and it is still civilian. Do you know anything about what took this Princeton undergrad, this Harvard postgrad, into a career in the military? I mean, he did public policy. What do we know about why he was so pro-war? Hexat's military service does need context. He was a citizen soldier, not a career military officer. He was deployed. He did earn some awards. He had two bronze stars and combat infantry badge, which, you know, are significant. But here's the thing. He's not a career general.

4:45He never ran a large military organization, never had a senior position. And most defense secretaries, or if we end up calling them war secretaries from now on, they come from decades of institutional experience, either, you know, as a high ranking military officer or senior government officials. We have former corporate executives who've managed huge organizations. So HexSeth experience is more personal, cultural and more tactical than strategic and institutional. That matters because the Pentagon is a massive organization. They have millions of personnel and a now a trillion dollar budget. So, you know, the job requires vast amount of managerial experience at the very least, right?

5:31At the very least. His supporters say, you know, his combat experience gives him credibility. While it is honourable that he served, it doesn't substitute for the kind of large scale management and strategic expertise the job demands. You know, you have to manage complex alliances with your allies. In the US, there's a lot of defence industry relationships. You have to negotiate with Congress.

5:58Can you just give me a sense of how Hegseth presents? Can you tell us more about his image? Hegseth is, and this is par for the course, with a lot of Trump's cabinet secretaries and their leaders. Hegseth is well put together. He has a big beaming smile made for TV. He always has a pro-Trump spin to his points. Trump wants these leaders around him that could sell his message to the broader audience, really. This is one of those things that may seem superficial at first, but with Hexeth, his body art very much can become a genuine national security concern and tells us something really about his worldview.

6:41He has a number of tattoos that reference Christianity, military service, and American history on his body. But there are three that generate the most controversy. He has a Jerusalem cross on his chest, the phrase Deus Fult on his bicep, and the Arabic word written in Arabic, kafir, below that. Right. So with the Jerusalem cross, it's, for those who don't know, it's a large Greek cross with four smaller crosses in each quadrant. It's historically a Christian symbol that goes back to the Crusades. And some say that the four crosses represent the four gospels. Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem have been getting this tattoo for centuries.

7:25And, you know, it's really used by legitimate religious organizations today, especially Catholics in Jerusalem. Why is it particularly controversial on Hexeth? So Hexeth describes as that, a symbol of his Christian faith, but it gets a bit complicated from that. We learned in January 2021, right after the Capitol riot, that Hexeth was supposed to serve with the National Guard on Biden's inauguration, but he was pulled from duty. We have a retired sergeant who sent an email flagging Hexeth as a possible insider threat. He wasn't exactly concerned about that tattoo, but he was concerned about the deus vault on his bicep.

8:04Deus vault, it's a Latin word. It means God wills it. It was a battle cry in the First Crusade. It's a phrase that, you know, pretty much exclusively has been adopted by the far right and white nationalist groups in today's times. Medieval historians say it's pretty unanimous that it's a call to religious uprising that glorifies the Crusades. It was also used at the Unite the Right rally, which famously in 2017 was a far right rally that also yelled the Jews will not replace us, among other egregious yellings and chants. It was also appearing on flags at the 6th January Capitol riot. So it wouldn't be unfair to assume that Pete Hegseth, that he knew the symbolism of this tattoo or, you know, at the very least, he was making a statement.

8:52Plus, you know, when you add kafir to the mix, which means a non-believer of Islam, it does paint quite an ugly picture. Yes, to use religious terms, it is a trifecta of invoking this very specific ideology. When you combine all of these, you start to see this more provocative way of Heksa thinking. You know, so kafir, we mentioned, it means non-believer, basically identifying himself as like an enemy of Islam. But of course, Hekseth has pushed back against all of this. He claims it's a way to push back against anti-Christian bigotry. But really, it tells us about Hekseth's worldview. He's written extensively about wanting to rebuild the third temple in Jerusalem, which would require destroying the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam.

9:41He's written in his books complaining about Muslim political representation. So when you look at his tattoos in that context, They're not exactly religious symbols. They're statements about civilizational conflict between Christianity and Islam. They suggest someone who views the world through a crusader lens where military force and religious identity are deeply intertwined. And I think that's what matters enormously when you're running the Pentagon, overseeing operations that just so happen to be targeting Muslim-majority countries and managing relationships with Muslim allies. And it sets the tone, really, for how millions of service members should be thinking about religious diversity and extremism.

10:31And what about his career before he became Secretary of Defense, which is a job title that I believe has changed to Secretary of War under this Trump administration? After coming back from deployments in the Middle East, where he was in Iraq and Afghanistan, he would eventually do veterans advocacy work. When he finished up his time there, He got recruited as a conservative analyst for Fox and Friends on the weekend. So Fox and Friends is really where Hegseth built his whole personality. Pete Hegseth tonight and for the remainder of the week. And he really built his profile attacking big institutions.

11:10First, the Veterans Affairs, then the Pentagon. He would call them slow, bloated, unaccountable. and he would really use these controversies around internal politics and governance. He would really be aggressive in pushing those tactics. He wrote a number of books. The most recent one was called War on Warriors, which was back in 2024. He's been saying for years that the military is too lawyered up, too cautious, too wrapped in bureaucracy. And I look forward to leading the men and women of our military. And my comment there, Senator, was about the burdensome rules of engagement that members of our generation, men and women, have seen on the battlefield.

11:53He thinks commanders should be more decisive. He's frustrated with legal constraints and process. He's very against, highly critical of DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, arguing, you know, political correctness, social justice policies, undermines cohesion and combat effectiveness. Call it wokeness, call it social justice, call it political correctness, whatever you want. They're seeing the things we used to only see on college campuses moving into the 101st Airborne and the 82nd Airborne. His whole thing is about what he calls the warrior ethos. His whole message is that America fights with one hand tied behind its back because of lawyers, oversight and cultural distractions.

12:36You know, that's his real whole thing. He thinks there's too much red tape, too much bureaucracy involved in the business of war. Absolutely. And it's that mindset that he brought in with him to the Pentagon, this ideology that caught Trump's ear. And he's a media savvy guy. He has a great smile and he quaffs his hair perfectly to the right. So good hairline and good teeth. You know, that's what worked on Trump clearly. And he was brought on. And now we're seeing what's been in his books coming out here in real life. Joseph, as far as I followed, though, he hasn't always been a Trump loyalist.

13:11Here's the problem with Trump. He says, go ahead and kill the family. Go ahead and torture. Go ahead and go further than waterboarding. What happens when people follow those orders or don't follow them? It's not clear that Donald Trump will have their back. Donald Trump is oftentimes about Donald Trump. And as much as we joke that, you know, his hairline and his teeth must have impressed the president, what do we know about why Trump did pick him? It's really hard to say what's in Trump's mind, you know, especially compared to the picks that he had the first time around, which were much more establishment focused.

13:42Clearly, what we do know about this pick is that it was a cultural warrior style pick where you want someone that is focused really on attacking political correctness as an issue, attacking DEI. and it really fit into Trump's second term strategy almost perfectly. Trump now wants loyalists who will push past what he sees as bureaucratic barriers and people who won't defer to the career side of the Pentagon. And Hex's whole public record is about smashing through those barriers and criticizing the bureaucracy. So when something goes wrong, you have a political environment where the traditional checks, you know, which the lawyers, career officials and more cautious people are already marginalised.

14:30That's the bigger context here. It's not just about the mission. It's really about what happens when you put someone in charge who fundamentally distrusts the institution that he's running. Joseph, how did Hegseth's appointment go down within the Republican Party and beyond it? Hegseth was first nominated November of last year to be the Secretary of Defence. And that was supposed to go in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and it ended up being a 50-50 tie eventually. During the hearings, allegations surfaced regarding sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior while running, you know, the veteran non-profits.

15:09Vice President-elect J.D. Vance played host to Defense Secretary Pick Pete Hegseth on Capitol Hill today, just as the news broke of a graphic newly released police report that detailed Hegseth's involvement in an alleged sexual assault in 2017. Hexeth was not charged and denies the allegations. The matter was fully investigated and I was completely clear. He of course denied the claims and we had key senators on the Republican side that Joni Ernst and Lisa Murkowski hesitant at first. In a long statement that she just put out on X, she goes after Hexeth, raises questions about his character, raises questions about his experiences, fitness for the job, raises questions about allegations of personal misconduct and statements that he made in the past criticizing women in combat.

16:02It was a key point in the transition process. And when it came down to the full Senate vote, it was 50-50. And that was, it's very rare. So Vice President J.D. Vance came down and he broke it. It really showed the early concerns here about, you know, judgment and character and suitability for the Pentagon's top leadership. Supporters framed it as part of a broader effort to discredit a loyal Trump ally. Joseph, what can you tell me about his record? What has he said and done in the job so far? The Pentagon has undergone these radical shifts just in the past year where it's known to be a nonpartisan institution.

16:41and all of a sudden it's hyper-partisan in choosing the press corps that aligns with them that they want to allow in. They've been wanting to cut out whistleblowers so they've been firing people and getting in these huge blow-ups in the Pentagon. It's really a culture of paranoia just from what we've been hearing, a culture of paranoia, anxiety and fear. Joseph, I think it's fair to say that Pete Hegseth really just first caught global attention when he was involved in this just astonishing story earlier this year. The US was about to conduct military strikes, and discussion of that was taking place in a group chat in which a journalist was involved.

17:26Could you talk me through what on earth happened? Oh, absolutely. So this was probably one of the most astonishing stories of the Trump administration in the first year. And that's saying a lot. What happened there was in March, Pete Hegseth alongside Marco Rubio, who's the secretary of state, J.D. Vance, the vice president, alongside others, had this signal group chat, an encrypted messaging group chat, where they would share these military strike details of hits about to go out in Yemen. A brutal series of U.S. airstrikes kills tens and injures more at Yemen's Ras Issa oil port. The death toll is high and will get higher.

18:12Now, former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz had added in a journalist from The Atlantic, the editor-in-chief. From there, we got to read the messages and see that he shared very sensitive military strike details. And how did you learn that a journalist was privy to the targets, the types of weapons used? I've heard I've heard I was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that's all I have to say about that. Thank you. And I had actually interviewed a former State Department attorney myself back in March, and he had been involved in past strikes under the Obama administration when it came to Yemen specifically.

18:54And he says if anyone shared these kinds of details, it would absolutely be a breach of Pentagon policy and that it was at the minimum classified information. You know, so he's sharing classified information in a group chat and who knows who else could have been there. Well, in the most embarrassing way, I mean, not only is it a security breach, he wasn't supposed to be using Signal in the first place to have it exposed to the entire world. I mean, it's beyond humiliating. And yet he survived in post. how was that and what was the reaction to it that's a that's the thing here trump will uh never want to cow to what he would call the woke mob right the trump administration doesn't want to give a win to anyone to the left of him by saying oh you guys have caught our uh secretary of defense uh discussing very private very secret and definitely classified information that they still don't admit to be any of the things, but we don't want to give you a win because we don't want to open the door to criticizing other members of our administration and firing them.

20:03What is your response to that? I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic. It's to me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it's not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what? They were using signal to coordinate on sensitive materials and having to do with what but the point really is it creates like this institutional risk you know because the internal chaos is a story in itself and it shows how the leadership style can ripple outwards and affect everything from operational decisions to legal compliance really and so from everything you say the white house trump himself completely styled this out.

20:44But there must have been some sort of official inquiry or a look into how and why this happened. I mean, can you tell us anything about that? After Signalgate, the Inspector General report came out in early December. And what the Inspector General report found was that Hexeth's messages in particular had put troops in danger because it laid out operational details of these strikes that were bound to happen. Hexeth claimed he was vindicated, but really what the inspector general's report found that American troops were at risk because he laid to bear all these pre-operational details that, you know, if intercepted, we know the Houthis have capabilities to strike.

21:26So that's the result of the inspector general report. Seemingly, there's no consequence for him. These past few weeks seem to be the most critical chapter in Hexeth's year-long run at this position, helming this$1 trillion institution. And we don't see where it's going to go. It looks like Trump still has his backing because he still appears at cabinet hearings alongside Trump and Trump hasn't broken from him at all. That's just where things are right now. Coming up, has Pete Hegseff committed a war crime in the Caribbean?

22:14The Free Birth Society made millions selling a simple message to pregnant women. You don't need ultrasounds, doctors or midwives. You can free birth. But behind the scenes, terrible things were happening. I feel ashamed about this, but I didn't think that the deaths were bad until a year after I left. Subscribe to The Guardian Investigates feed to get all the episodes of The Birth Keepers. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Out now. Joseph, in September, the US began these audacious attacks of boats allegedly full of drug smugglers in the Caribbean. We spoke to Andrew Roth about this story recently and how it has involved the biggest deployment of US troops in the region since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

23:02So far, we know that 87 people have been killed by the US military in about 22 attacks, and they are arguably war crimes. How did Pete Hegseth talk about them? The Hegseth take on these strikes was that it was necessary. They want to kill these so-called narco-terrorists in the water. He mentioned that it made him proud, you know, and that it was even harder to find more people to kill because they're in hiding. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing and we knew exactly who they represented. And that was Trendy Aragway, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.

23:46The important part here is that all the experts and former officials say that fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not from Caribbean boats, from Venezuela. And we even had the DEA report that came out April of 2025, where Venezuela did not appear in the fentanyl section. His Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, had said that these strikes are saving hundreds of millions of people. That's not a typo. Hundreds of millions of people. The fentanyl point is important because that's been Trump's defense in saying that they are stopping it from entering the US. Right.

24:24And by these strikes are doing that. But as you say, there's no documentary evidence to say that Venezuela is responsible. Right. Joseph, in the last week, those killings and attacks have taken on an even darker twist. Can you tell us what's been revealed? On the 2nd of September, the strikes really started to take shape in the Caribbean. Hexeth had said that he was a witness to these strikes And he described seeing the boats blowing up in the ocean. They had posted the videos on X and on Trump's Truth Social. But what we had learned recently was that there was a follow-up strike on the survivors in the water.

25:06And this had killed people that were hanging on to the sides of the boats. And there was a double tap strike, which in any rule of engagement, if you think about the rules of war, you know, killing a survivor is a war crime. Now, what happens when you go to Hexeth about it? Well, he said it was the fog of war. I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire or smoke. You can't see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war, which is a line that supposedly explains why he didn't see survivors in the water until hours later. But fog of war is an admission of information failure.

25:48It means command and control didn't have clear situational awareness, which means we need to have a real investigation about this. And congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans are coming out and saying is that these strikes are probably the worst things that they've seen in their careers. You know, and we had that from now Republicans and from Democrats who have seen the footage. You know, that's really where we stand right now. And I would say if you build a campaign that encourages these decisive strikes, you can't then plead fog of war when those decisions produce potentially unlawful outcomes.

26:27Joseph, where does all of this leave Pete Hegseth? Where it leaves Pete Hegseth is exposed. He's the head of an agency filled with fear and paranoia and anxiety. American citizens do not support these strikes in a wide margin. In the end, it would undoubtedly be the tipping point for any other Secretary of State, any other Secretary of War as he now goes by. But, you know, he remains afloat. We still have an investigation that members of the House and Senate are compiling and presenting soon. But for right now, it's just hot water for Hegseth.