Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told Newsmax on Tuesday that Pete Hegseth is the right man to run the Pentagon because the military needs "drastic change" and it takes a drill sergeant, not a general, to do it.
Tuberville joined "Rob Schmitt Tonight" to talk about President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for defense secretary, who's been making his rounds on Capitol Hill ahead of his confirmation hearing next month and amid anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct.
Tuberville said he's unmoved — Hegseth is getting his vote.
"We need drastic change. And President Trump wants to change it all," Tuberville said. "This will be our last chance."
Tuberville said Democrat presidents dating to Bill Clinton have "tried to destroy the military."
"Barack Obama really went for the jugular and really did a lot of damage to our military, pushing all these quotas and critical race theory," Tuberville said, adding that outgoing President Joe Biden "is absolutely trying to put us under."
Tuberville said it's going to take a drill sergeant, how he likens Hegseth, to enact change.
"I really like Pete Hegseth simply for the fact that the age that he is, he's 44 years old, he can communicate with the warfighter," Tuberville told Schmitt. "We need to clean our Pentagon out. And we do have some good people over there. But the problem that we have, ever since Afghanistan, all these admirals and generals that were in the Pentagon, not one of them walked out and said, 'Hey, we can't do what we're doing in Afghanistan. We can't run from a fight.' And we did, and we got a lot of people killed.
"And so a lot of people need to pay the price for this. Pete Hegseth will do the job. He understands it. Twenty year war fighter, business guy, well-educated. He's not a general. And I love that. We need a drill sergeant. We don't need a general in the Pentagon to run the DOD from now on," he said.
As for the steady drip of allegations coming out against him, Tuberville said the "media's gonna try to destroy Pete Hegseth."
"They're gonna do everything they possibly can because they know … [he's] the answer to the problems we have in Washington, D.C., when it comes to the military."
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Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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