Mrs. Secretary Hegseth takes command at the Pentagon

Mrs. Secretary Hegseth escorts her husband to White House Easter Egg hunt

Here’s something quaint to tickle your funny bone on this 101^st Dark Night of Our Souls: Practically the same day the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been making use of his wife Jennifer in an “unorthodox role” in the Pentagon, Hegseth announced that he was eliminating a program intended to empower women’s participation in what the Post called “national security spaces” that include the Pentagon. In times which now seem to have faded into a distant, fuzzy past, this would have been called a policy contradiction, or even – here’s another good one – hypocritical.

Mrs. Hegseth, the Defense Secretary’s third wife, was a producer at Fox News when Hegseth was a guest on the morning chat-show “Fox and Friends.” She was pregnant with his child at the same time Hegseth was getting a divorce from his second wife. This was also around the same time he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman at a hotel in Lake Tahoe in 2017. He later paid the woman $50,000 to settle a lawsuit she filed against him for the sexual assault. Hegseth and Jennifer would later marry in a ceremony at one of Trump’s golf clubs in New Jersey in 2019.

Hegseth has admitted to having a drinking problem during the time he allegedly assaulted the woman in Lake Tahoe. During his confirmation hearings, he promised that he would not consume “even a drop of alcohol” if he was confirmed as Defense Secretary. In an interview last year with conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, Hegseth claimed that his “two J’s,” Jesus and Jennifer, had changed him and made him a different person from the man he was when he was taking the staff of a veterans’ group he chaired to strip clubs and standing on the tops of bars and chug-a-lugging beers and shots. “Without those two J’s,” Hegseth told Kelly on her podcast, “I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

The Secretary of Defense seems to have rewarded one of his “J’s” by regularly taking her to work at the Pentagon, where she has been included in high-level meetings with his counterparts from Great Britain and other countries. He has taken her on official trips to Europe for meetings with NATO countries that have pledged support for Ukraine and the Munich Security Conference in February.

Jennifer Hegseth was also included in at least one chat group on the social media platform Signal during which Hegseth shared specific attack plans on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Washington Post reported yesterday that there appears to have been a third Signal chat organized by Hegseth that included his wife. Others on that Signal chat included Tami Radabaugh, described by the Post as “a former Fox News producer overseeing how Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon engage with the media,” and Sean Parnell, a senior advisor to Hegseth and one of the Pentagon spokesmen. Why Hegseth would need not one, but two former Fox News producers in a chat group to discuss top secret military affairs has not been explained by either Hegseth or spokesmen for the Pentagon.

Hegseth has engaged in other “unorthodox” behavior in his new position overseeing the 1.4 million members of the nation’s uniformed military services and another 1.5 million civilian defense employees. It was recently revealed that Hegseth had an insecure wired public internet connection installed on one of his office computers so that he could use the Signal program on that machine. (Commercial cell phones do not work well in the Pentagon which was constructed using thick walls of reinforced concrete that is not friendly to cell signals.)

Jennifer Hegseth’s presence around the E-Ring at the Pentagon is ubiquitous enough that she is frequently referred to as “The Leash,” apparently a reference to the tight control she exerts over her dry-drunk alcoholic husband. Other Pentagon staffers refer to her as “Yoko Ono,” who was widely seen as such a controlling influence over her husband John Lennon that their relationship was thought to be one of the causes of the break-up of the Beatles.

His wife hasn’t been able to keep Hegseth out of other problems he has faced. Hegseth recently fired two of his closest advisers for allegedly leaking stories to the press. He ordered that the two be investigated by the Pentagon Inspector General. Those investigations were dropped last week, but the two aides have not been rehired. Hegseth also got rid of his chief of staff, Joe Kasper, who was closely involved in the firings surrounding leaks about the two Signal chats Hegseth was involved in concerning the air attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen. Kasper was originally supposed to “transition” to a different job in the Pentagon, but last week, it was announced that he would be leaving Defense Department employ altogether. He will return to “government relations and consulting,” according to a report in Politico.

No Secretary of Defense in American history has had his wife as an informal advisor who frequently accompanies her husband to work. Jennifer Hegseth has been involved in interviews with prospective hires for Pentagon jobs, either sitting in on interviews with her husband or interviewing job candidates herself. Jennifer Hegseth does not have an official Pentagon position or job title. Nor does she have the kind of high-level security clearance that would ordinarily be required if someone was to sit in on top-level meetings with foreign officials at which highly sensitive material would be discussed.

As far as the Signal chats are concerned, there has never been in the history of this country another instance of official conversations or contacts taking place between high level officers of the Department of Defense outside of official channels, so there is no comparison that can be made involving who had the requisite security clearances and “need to know” about military attack plans of the kind that were shared with others by Hegseth and his wife over Signal.

As Secretary of Defense, Hegseth appears to stand alone in his level of unpreparedness for the job and incompetence once in office. His alcoholism alone would have been an absolute disqualifier in previous administrations of both political parties, as would the charges he faced for sexually assaulting a woman. Even adultery would have been a disqualifier in past years.

Hegseth’s intended elimination of the “Women, Peace and Security” program this week has been misbegotten and mishandled right from the start. Hegseth posted this announcement on X: “This morning, I proudly ENDED the “Women, Peace & Security” (WPS) program inside the @DeptofDefense. WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING.”

The Women, Peace and Security program was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in his first term. Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, was the lead sponsor of the bill in the House, and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was the lead co-sponsor of the bi-partisan bill in the Senate. While he was a congressman, Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Walz, was the chairman of the House WPS caucus for several years.

This is, of course, the problem with the kind of broad-brush approach the Trump administration has taken to all things even marginally identifiable as DEI-related. This country’s uniformed military is about 18 percent female. Countless women work in civilian positions in the Department of Defense, and there have been women who have served as Secretaries of several of the military services, as well as undersecretaries and deputy secretaries, not only of defense and the military services, but in all the intelligence agencies. The WPS program was intended to encourage and empower women to work in capacities at all levels of the nation’s defense. One of the projects championed by the WPS program was an effort to ensure that military combat gear and ballistic defense vests and helmets fit the female body as well as they fit men. Hegseth and the rest of the Republican manosphere can say what they want about women’s roles in the combat arms, but in modern warfare, everyone is vulnerable to enemy attack by drones, missiles, artillery and airstrikes, even soldiers serving in combat support positions like transportation, signal, and supply.

What Hegseth wants to do is cancel the program that helped to ensure that women in military positions vulnerable to enemy attack are as well protected as men. That should be a big help when it comes to recruiting and retaining women in military service.

Trump was quoted in one of his 100-day interviews as saying of Hegseth, “I think he’s going to get it together.” Well, if Trump ends up firing Pete, he could appoint Jennifer to replace him. She comes prepared with the requisite background at Fox News and has had plenty of on-the-job training. She even has her own account on Signal.