‘profound Fear And Anxiety Among Women In Uniform’: Pentagon Reacts To Allegations Against Hegseth 

The release of a police report with graphic details of sexual assault allegations against Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be Defense secretary, is stoking concerns among current and former Defense Department officials that the agency could backslide on efforts to put an end to those abuses in the military.

Officials fear that Hegseth, whose nomination had already caused controversy due to his opposition to women serving in combat, could also hurt efforts to recruit women into the military.

“When you have a leader that has already been credibly accused of sexual assault and then already has other signals in his background that he’s not concerned about the contributions that women can make to national security, it could create bad signals up and down the chain of command,” said one Defense Department official, who like others was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I imagine there is already profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform.”

In 2017, a woman told police that Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Army veteran, sexually assaulted her after barring the door to her hotel room and seizing her cellphone. The police report was released to the media on Thursday. Hegseth, who has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, was never charged.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

During Trump’s first administration, sexual assault in the military began to tick up, starting in 2018, and then continued to increase, exploding as a major national issue in 2020 after Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old soldier, was killed by another service member after telling her family she had been sexually harassed.

“To have someone who now at least has had a police investigation and paid a victim, enforced a [nondisclosure agreement] regarding a sexual assault sends a horrific message,” said a former DOD official. “It likely means that any progress the department has made regarding sexual assault, sexual harassment is going to be at best, repealed, if not completely eliminated.”

During the Biden administration, the Pentagon set up a 90-day independent review board to address sexual assault, which removed the job of trying sex crimes, domestic violence, and child abuse from military commanders and put them in the hands of specialist military lawyers. The military has also launched an effort to hire thousands of psychologists to help deal with sexual assault.

“The military has come a long way to provide spaces for victims to be able to see some change and feel empowered,” said a second former DOD official. “Military sexual trauma is now something that is universally recognized where it wasn’t in previous decades.”

Katherine Kuzminski, director of the Military, Veterans, and Society program at the Center for a New American Security, a left-leaning think tank, pointed out that women at the Pentagon are concerned over a number of policies that will be under fire in the Trump administration. They include rules around women serving in combat and the litany of diversity programs within the department.

All of those efforts “are all DOD policy, not law, and so would be within [Hegseth’s] control,” she said. “The question then, is the impact that that might have on specifically the Army and the Marine Corps, given the opening of combat positions to women and just the overall culture within the services.”

The second former DOD official noted the Pentagon has made progress, even though the problem hasn’t gone away.

“The military has come a long way to provide spaces for victims to be able to see some change and feel empowered,” the former DOD official said. “Military sexual trauma is now something that is universally recognized where it wasn’t in previous decades.”

Service members now have greater leeway to separate from the military due to sexual assault, receive benefits, or change units quietly. “I can’t imagine how any victim wouldn’t feel triggered by all of this news and then have faith in the system,” the second former official said.

But the effort to build the so-called Integrated Primary Prevention Workforce to serve at bases in the United States and around the world is already challenged by commanders who want to move their people into combat jobs. And there are still some in the military branches who dismiss sexual assault as a real problem.

“The Army is doing OK on hiring but isn’t close to full up,” the first DOD official said. “Those are new billets and there is constant pressure not to hire people or shift resources. Commanders want to do things that aren’t prevention work.”

A Pentagonreport on suicide in the military released this month found that 3 percent of people who committed suicide reported to have suffered physical or sexual assault or harassment within the last year. Overall, reported cases of sexual assault in the military fell in 2023 according to the Pentagon’s latest numbers, but Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates there were roughly 73,600 cases in 2023, a vastly higher number than DOD’s estimate of 29,000 that year.

Current and former DOD officials worry that turning a blind eye to sexual assault could drive down recruiting and threaten retention at a time when the Pentagon is supporting allies in two wars and preparing for one of its own in the Indo-Pacific.

“It means we can’t win,” said Andrea Goldstein, the Navy’s former acting director for force resiliency who led efforts to prevent sexual harassment and assault inside the service. “It’s that simple. If you want to protect the peace and fight and win our nation’s wars, you need to have a strong, resilient fighting force. And if you are undermining that strong and resilient fighting force in the form of denigrating members of your formation, in the form of doing things that make them less safe particularly from other service members, then you can’t achieve your mission.”