Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) praised Pete Hegseth after meeting with President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, saying he is the “drill sergeant” that can get the Pentagon back on the right track.
The former football coach sat down with Hegseth for about 40 minutes Monday as Hegseth resumed meeting with senators ahead of his January confirmation hearings.
After their sit-down in Tuberville’s senatorial office, Tuberville, who has known Hegseth, told a gaggle of reporters that Hegseth is the man for the job.
“We don’t need a general officer, admiral, or a person of high command,” he said. “We need a drill sergeant” to “straighten the military out, to get the woke, the DEI affiliation out, and go from there.”
Coach Tuberville praised Hegseth’s work ethic and intelligence, insisting he will work to advance the military’s core mission of combat readiness, not to protect the bureaucracy itself.
“He’s going to make the military stronger, better trained, put the money in the right spot,” Tuberville said. “He’s gonna be for the people actually doing the fighting, not for the people who plan to fight.”
Tuberville added that Hegseth “understands the business side as well as the military side, [he’s] been in 20 years. He’s actually fought in wars, but he’s a good age to [be] somebody that can relate to the young men and women that we need to recruit in the military.”
The Defense Department’s armed services branches have struggled to recruit in recent years, with Director of Military Accession Policy Katie Helland attributing the challenges to “a market that has low youth propensity to serve, limited familiarity with military opportunities, a competitive labor market, and a declining eligibility among young adults.”
But Tuberville has blamed recruiting difficulties on the military straying from its core mission, instead serving as a social experiment and incubator for leftist ideology running counter to the American values potential recruits would choose to fight for.
“Our military right now is running on fumes because we cannot get enough men and women into the military to want to fight for the United States of America, because they don’t want to get into a military that’s woke [and] that doesn’t believe in the past relevance of what this country teaches our military,” Tuberville said Monday. “We need a machine that’s going to protect the country and its allies.”
Tuberville pushed back against accusations recycled by the mainstream media against Hegseth, insisting “there’s not gonna be anything to this at the end of the day.”
He said Hegseth has time to publicly address any criticisms but “right now, the number one objective is to go out and sell himself to at least 51 or 52 senators. That’s the job he needs to do to get confirmed,” noting that “he’s got a month and a half to put all that together.”
Tuberville praised Trump’s nominations of Kash Patel for Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, saying those along with Hegseth’s nomination are necessary to get the country focused on addressing its core problems.
“We’ve got so many things going on right now, we can’t focus on one,” Tuberville said. “So that’s reason we need to get our military in the right position with somebody like Pete Hegseth.”
“We need to get back to basics, and I think these people can help us,” he concluded.
