Bronze Stars, like those Hegseth earned, are common among military officers

“You want someone there, leading the DOD, who has served in combat, who knows what it’s like to be shot at,” Trump adviser Jason Miller told Fox News this week, touting the 44-year-old former National Guardsman’s Bronze Stars and his Ivy League education.

Military experts say there is a mistaken belief among much of the American public that the Bronze Star is a rarefied award exclusively for battlefield heroics, which has distorted and inflated its significance in many cases. The U.S. military issues two versions of the award: one with a “V” device denoting valor in combat, and the other for commendable job performance on deployments, or “meritorious service” in military parlance.

The Bronze Stars listed in Hegseth’s official records fall into the latter category, according to his official service records. Such awards were issued somewhat liberally throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, experts say. Awardees of the meritorious service medal are predominantly military officers like Hegseth, data provided by the military shows. While many officers have risked their lives on the battlefield, the majority of fighting and exposure to danger is performed by the enlisted troops they command.

Hegseth also received a Combat Infantryman Badge, which is awarded when infantry soldiers and officers engage an enemy in combat.

For many military officers who serve in war zones, Bronze Stars are akin to a pass or fail, said Jason Dempsey, a former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now a leader in civilian-military relations.

“The expectation is you’re getting one, unless you mess up,” said Dempsey, who also has two Bronze Stars dating to his wartime deployments. “It sounds exotic,” he added, “but unfortunately people don’t realize, more often than not, it’s something fairly routine and bureaucratic.”

Members of the enlisted corps have characterized the medal for meritorious service as a “participation trophy” for officers who do what is expected of them. Enlisted leaders, who can submit award recommendations for subordinates, have long complained about the difficulty of recognizing junior troops with awards. They point to the military’s officer-driven culture and a prevailing belief that rank-and-file personnel rate more limited recognition for their performance outside of extraordinary acts of selflessness.

Hegseth could not be reached for comment. As his professional record and personal conduct have faced scrutiny, he has denied the claims leveled against him and remained defiant, telling Megyn Kelly in an interview this week, “There’s no reason to back down.”

A spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, Karoline Leavitt, attacked The Washington Post’s reporting, calling it an attempt to “smear” Trump’s cabinet picks and “minimize the honorable service of Pete Hegseth.”

“This,” she said, “is another disgusting story.”

To his supporters, the Princeton- and Harvard-educated Hegseth is a disrupter perfectly suited to upend an institution that many Trump-aligned conservatives have maligned for having lost its focus on fighting and winning wars.

A former Fox News host whose pointed views on military affairs first attracted Trump’s interest years ago, Hegseth served in several National Guard units during his career. He left the service in 2021, after being turned away from an assignment to protect the U.S. Capitol in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election defeat and the violent effort by his supporters to reverse the outcome.

Though Hegseth has forcefully denied the assertions, his tattoos drew scrutiny among fellow service members for their similarity to certain white nationalist imagery, and a D.C. Guard soldier overseeing security questioned whether he could be an “insider threat.”

The citation for Hegseth’s first Bronze Star, received in 2006, states he “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.” He was attached then to an active-duty unit operating in the restive city of Samarra and was recognized for work as a platoon leader and a civil affairs officer. He has recounted a close call in Iraq when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his vehicle but did not explode, describing the event as traumatic. The unit he supported was rocked by a war crimes scandal after he left, and though he did not take part in it, those events did color his sympathy for troops involved in similar incidents.

His citation for the second award cites his work as a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan in 2012. He wrote in his book “The War on Warriors,” published this year, that he pulled “bodies out of burning vehicles” there.

Neither of Hegseth’s Bronze Star citation mentions combat exploits specifically. And while Trump has implied that, writing in a social media post Nov. 13 that his nominee for defense secretary received two Bronze Stars for “his actions on the battlefield,” there is no record of Hegseth himself having inflated or embellished the awards’ significance.

In both cases, the Bronze Stars he received were awarded within a month of Hegseth’s tours ending, his service record shows. It’s a common circumstance to recognize efforts during a deployment rather than a specific action or moment, military experts said.

Award data provided by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps offers a glimpse into how the Bronze Star was typically distributed during the post-9/11 wars. Across the three services, where officers compose between 12 and 20 percent of the force, they received between 58 and 65 percent of the awards for meritorious service. With Bronze Star medals earned for combat valor, the dynamic is reversed, with the vast majority going to enlisted troops, the data shows.

A spokesperson for the Army did not provide comparable data ahead of this report’s publication.

Overall, Hegseth’s record suggests he was proficient at his job and met the Army’s rigorous expectations of infantry officers.

A Post review of his awards show some are consistent with legions of military personnel whose service coincided with the response to 9/11. Another decoration he received, the National Defense Service Medal, was given to service members after completing 90 days of service between 2001 and 2022, making it an award most troops earned before they finished boot camp. Iraq and Afghanistan campaign medals, which Hegseth also received, were awarded to those who deployed to or supported operations in those regions. His Expert Infantryman Badge was awarded following a test of fundamental combat skills, part of the rite of passage for Army infantrymen that not all receive.

Military experts say the American public’s misunderstanding of what such awards signify — and what they don’t — is rooted in the gulf that exists between the comparatively few who serve in uniform and everyone else.

The military does not offer bonuses or other perks for job performance, making awards the principal means by which commanders recognize their subordinates, said Dempsey, who heads Columbia University’s Center for Veteran Transition and Integration. Awards are distributed based on rank and responsibilities, he noted, with officers and some senior enlisted troops receiving a large volume of Bronze Stars specifically in the 20 years of war following 9/11.

So this saturation, coupled with the public’s propensity to lionize those who have a Bronze Star, has led many Americans to overestimate its rarity, Dempsey said. “It reflects the cheapness of the discourse around the military when people grab for these exotic-sounding terms that they don’t understand,” he added.

Conjecture over the Bronze Star as a signifier of competence and experience has played out elsewhere in American politics — on both sides of the political aisle.

Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-Texas), responding to claims this year that his military records showed only one of his two Bronze Stars, posted both of his citations online to prove he earned them while serving as an Army officer. One commended him for duties that included procuring office furniture. The other broadly described good performance over the course of a deployment.

Nehls also drew scrutiny for wearing a lapel pin signifying the Army’s Combat Infantryman Badge, despite not qualifying for the recognition.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), who served in a military police role as an officer in the Army Reserve, apologized this year for what he called the “honest mistake” of listing a Bronze Star he did not receive among his accomplishments in his 2006 application for a White House fellowship. Moore claimed a superior officer in the Army encouraged him to include the award in his application materials because he assumed it would be approved.

Veterans turned politicians, as well as their supporters, have incentive to leverage the public’s limited understanding of the military and its award system, said Katherine L. Kuzminski, a military policy expert at the Center for a New American Security. She noted that former service members often receive deference in American society, and that can become a concern when the job at hand may exceed what their military experience says about their professional qualifications.

Bronze Stars and other awards, Kuzminski said, “signal credibility that may not actually carry into other areas.”

With Hegseth’s Senate confirmation facing uncertainty, Trump is said to be considering others for the role. Among them is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose credentials include the oversight of thousands of National Guard forces in his state.

DeSantis served as an officer in the Navy Reserve. He also is a recipient of the Bronze Star for meritorious service.