Hegseth is a decorated infantry officer who spent more than 18 years in the Guard and served in combat, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan and reaching the rank of major.
But he does not have the senior leadership experience typical of nominees to lead the US military, which employs some 2.9 million people and has an annual budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
What he does have is approval from Trump, who has long used right-wing Fox News as a key platform -- and source of information.
After joining Fox in 2014 as a contributor, the 44-year-old now co-hosts Fox and Friends Weekend and is a host for streaming service Fox Nation. He has also authored multiple books.
Trump hailed Hegseth as "tough, smart and a true believer in America First" in a social media post announcing the nomination. "With Pete at the helm, America's enemies are on notice -- Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down."
The president-elect also highlighted Hegseth's success as an author, saying his book "The War on Warriors" was a best-seller, and that it "reveals the leftwing betrayal of our Warriors, and how we must return our Military to meritocracy, lethality, accountability, and excellence."
Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Hegseth's selection was unexpected.
"As someone said, this wasn't on anyone's bingo card, so it's a very surprising pick," he said. "Clearly Trump wants someone who is loyal to him" and who "does not have an independent political base."
Cancian said Hegseth "has an excellent record as a junior military officer" but "lacks high-level national security experience and experience leading a large institution," and could face significant opposition in Congress as a result.
- Potential 'civil-military crisis' -
Hegseth is a frequent critic of so-called "woke" policies -- by companies, at universities, and in the military -- that attempt to increase opportunities for ethnic and sexual minorities.
Those efforts, such as the widely used Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, program, will likely be scrapped within the Pentagon if Hegseth wins confirmation in the Senate.
On an episode of the "Shawn Ryan Show" podcast aired earlier this month, Hegseth advocated for the firing of top US military officer General CQ Brown and said that any other senior officer who "was involved in any of the DEI woke shit has got to go."
Cancian said if the Trump administration stops at rolling back diversity programs it would resemble his first term in office, but that going further and taking a step such as firing Brown would "engender a civil-military crisis."
Hegseth said on the same podcast episode that he was opposed to women serving in combat roles, though not their presence in the armed forces as a whole.
"Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat means casualties are worse," he said.
Hegseth reportedly lobbied Trump in 2019 to intervene in three war crimes cases, leading to pardons in two murder cases and the reinstatement of the rank of a third service member who was convicted for posing for a photo with a body in Iraq.
He appeared to confirm those efforts on the podcast, saying: "I was proud to be a part of, in a small way, behind the scenes, with all of those, with the pardons that came from President Trump."
Hegseth is an Ivy Leaguer, graduating from both Princeton and Harvard, though his website says he sent his degree back to the latter institution, and he has criticized it on air for its allegedly left-leaning policies.
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