As Democrats deride President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense, one congressman says Hegseth is just the man to turn the Biden-Harris administration’s “woke and weaponized” military into a “strong and focused” fighting force.

Trump’s proposal to remove underperforming or politicized generals would actually depoliticize a Pentagon that once again failed its annual audit, he added.

Hegseth, an Ivy League graduate who served in the military, has been “wrongly criticized” as a lightweight, Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Monday. “We’re going to get a strong and focused military. Pete Hegseth has written books about it. He’s a well-educated, very successful combat veteran as an infantry officer, and I think he’s the right kind of leader. We have to get him confirmed.”

Democrats and the legacy media lumped in criticism of Hegseth with concern over Trump’s proposed executive order establishing a Warrior Board to review, and possibly remove, three- and four-star generals who moved up the ranks due more to their political views than their military prowess.

“Our senior ranks are already bloated. We have one officer for every nine enlisted soldiers. When we won World War II, we had one officer for every 30 enlisted soldiers,” Davidson told Perkins. “We’re very top heavy.”

Removing military officers has occurred numerous times under Democratic presidents. Barack Obama purged 197 military officers over five years. In 1941, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third term, General George C. Marshall removed 600 officers over age or physical fitness concerns.

The Left has tried to portray this as part of the president-elect’s “war on democracy” and “norms.”

On Sunday, “ABC This Week” host Martha Raddatz asked if Trump plans to “fire or arrest” generals “he considers woke, or those close to former Chairman Mark Milley.”

Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., just elected Michigan’s next senator, dismissed the tribunal as a “kangaroo court” that would, for the first time, introduce politics into the military. “I think we’re really at risk of politicizing the military in a way that we can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said........

© The Daily Signal