What military units did pete hegseth serve with during his army career?
Executive summary
Pete Hegseth served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army National Guard with deployments to Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, attaching to specific formations including a New Jersey Army National Guard unit at Guantánamo and the 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division in Iraq; later assignments list him with the Minnesota Army National Guard and roles as a counterinsurgency instructor in Kabul [1] [2] [3] [4]. Reporting is broadly consistent on locations and broad formations, while individual unit labels and later reserve affiliations are reported with some variation across sources [2] [5].
1. Early commission and National Guard service: infantry officer in the Army National Guard
Hegseth was commissioned as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army National Guard after graduating from Princeton, a point repeated in official Department of Defense and historical profiles that establish his entry as a Guard infantry officer rather than as a Regular Army commissioned officer [1] [4]. Several biographical summaries and encyclopedic profiles describe his rise through Guard ranks to company-level and field-grade status, culminating in later descriptions of him as a major [3] [4].
2. Guantánamo Bay with a New Jersey Army National Guard unit
Multiple contemporary profiles specify that Hegseth, as a second lieutenant, served at Guantánamo Bay as part of a New Jersey Army National Guard unit during 2004–2005, a deployment often cited as his first post-commission assignment [2] [6]. That Guantánamo tour is consistently recorded across Ballotpedia and veteran-oriented accounts, which present it as the opening operational chapter of his three deployments [2] [7].
3. Iraq with the 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division — infantry platoon leader and CMO officer
Reporting uniformly places Hegseth in Iraq with the 3rd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division for the 2005–2006 tour, where he served as an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad in 2005 and later as a civil-military operations officer in Samarra in 2006 [2] [8] [6]. These specific positions—infantry platoon leader and civil-military operations officer—are reproduced across congressional testimony, veteran group biographies and organizational profiles, which also attribute to him combat-related awards earned during those deployments [8] [4] [6].
4. Afghanistan: counterinsurgency instructor with the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul
Hegseth’s third deployment is documented as a return to Afghanistan, where he served as the senior counterinsurgency instructor at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul in 2011–2012 while wearing a Minnesota Army National Guard affiliation in multiple biographies [6] [3] [9]. Encyclopedic and organizational profiles describe this role as a training and advisory billet rather than a platoon-combat command, and they credit it as part of his 2010s service record with the Minnesota Guard [3] [9].
5. Later service status and variations in reporting
Sources diverge somewhat on Hegseth’s later administrative status: some accounts list periods in the Individual Ready Reserve and shifts between state Guard affiliations (including Minnesota and later D.C. Guard mentions), while others summarize his service as intermittent National Guard duty spanning multiple intervals through the 2010s [5] [7]. Official Department of Defense and historical biographies emphasize the Guard commissions and deployments but do not uniformly detail every administrative transfer, and secondary outlets differ in how they label final reserve status [1] [10] [5].
6. What the records reliably show — and what remains ambiguous
Across official bios, encyclopedias and veteran records, the consistent, corroborated facts are that Hegseth served in the Army National Guard; deployed to Guantánamo Bay with a New Jersey Guard unit, to Iraq with the 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (infantry platoon leader and CMO officer), and to Afghanistan as a counterinsurgency instructor attached to Guard elements [2] [8] [6] [3] [4]. What is less uniform in the sources are the exact administrative transfers among state National Guards and the precise end dates or reserve classifications reported by various outlets, which require primary service records for definitive resolution — records not included in the cited reporting [5] [7].