The Pentagon is baffled by Donald Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, a National Guard veteran and Fox News host who has called for a purge of generals for pursuing “woke” diversity policies.

Hegseth has questioned whether Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Brown was given the top job because he is black, accusing him of “pursuing the radical positions of left-wing politicians.”

Hegseth was a major in the Minnesota National Guard who served as a prison guard at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and served in Iraq and Afghanistan before becoming an outspoken right-wing critic of the military.

He has advocated accelerating the delivery of more U.S. weapons to Ukraine to defend against Russia, but has also questioned U.S. membership in NATO. His appointment is also a boost for Israel’s far right, as he has expressed support for territorial expansion and suggested that Jews could build a new temple on the sacred grounds surrounding Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Hegseth told an audience in Jerusalem in 2018: “There is no reason why the miracle of the restoration of the temple on the Temple Mount cannot be possible.”

The Israeli settler movement is also celebrating Trump’s appointment of Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, as U.S. ambassador to Israel.

During a visit to the region in 2017, Huckabee, an evangelical Baptist minister, said: “There is no such thing as a West Bank – it’s Judea and Samaria.”

He said: “There is no such thing as a settlement. They are communities. They are neighborhoods. They are cities. There is no such thing as an occupation” – a position that is dramatically at odds with current US policy and international law on the occupied Palestinian territory.

Trump’s appointment of Hegseth, 44, a chat show commentator with minimal management experience, to lead the US military establishment of 1.3 million active-duty troops and its nearly 1 million civilian workforce has taken Congress and the Pentagon by surprise.

Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said: “There is a concern that this is not someone who is serious enough a policy maker, serious enough policy implementer, to do a successful job.”

Military officials described the choice as “coming out of the blue,” the Army Times reported, and they quoted an unnamed senior military officer as saying the choice raised concerns about whether Hegseth had the experience to handle a to lead a government department with a budget of more than 100 million euros. than $800 billion.

During his first term in the White House, Trump clashed with the people he chose to run the Pentagon, but Hegseth has shown himself to be a loyalist with a shared hostility toward the military establishment.

Hegseth wrote in his memoir: “The next president of the United States must radically overhaul the Pentagon’s senior leadership to prepare us to defend our nation and defeat our enemies. A lot of people have to be fired.”

In appointing Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hegseth asked: “Was it because of the color of his skin? Or his skill? We’ll never know.”

There are concerns at the top of the US military that Hegseth could help Trump pursue retaliation against generals and other senior officers seen in the past as insufficiently loyal to the president-elect.

In particular, Mark Milley, a retired general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s first term and who resisted Trump’s calls to deploy troops against protesters, reportedly fears being recalled by Trump, leaving him to court-martial may be brought.

Milley recently told journalist and author Bob Woodward that he now believed Trump was a “fascist through and through.”