NEW: Newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on reforming US military leadership:
Anyone "involved in the woke sh*t has got to go...you have to reestablish that trust by putting in no-nonsense warfighters in those positions who aren't going to cater to the socially correct garbage."
FULL REMARKS:
HEGSETH: There's a chance to course correct it, but, it would take the new a new Trump administration going after it really hard.
RYAN: How would they correct it? Well, first of all, you got a fire.
HEGSETH: "You've got to fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and obviously, to bring in a new Secretary of Defense, but any General that was involved, General, Admiral, whatever that was involved in any of the DEI woke sh*t has got to go."
"Either you're in for war fighting and that's it. That's the only litmus test we care about. You got to get DEI and CRT out of military academies. You're not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking. And then, you know, whatever the standards, whatever the combat standards were, say, and, I don't know, 1995, let's just make those the standards. And as far as recruiting to hire the guy that, you know, did Top Gun Maverick and create some real ads that motivate people to want to serve."
"And there's lots of other ways in which you could identify who gets promoted and what. But there's an ethos change, I mean, there's a reason we're not, people don't want to serve because they don't trust that their senior leaders are going to have their best interest in mind in combat."
"I know there were mistakes made on our tours all over the place. But I, at least for the most part, had a sense that my senior leaders were committed to the completion of the mission for the right reasons, and maybe there were strategic differences and all that other stuff. And it wasn't always perfect, but now that trust is broken. And you have to reestablish that trust by by putting in no nonsense warfighters in those positions who aren't going to cater to the socially correct garbage."
The remarks were made in an episode of The Shawn Ryan Show released November 7.