Pete Hegseth

Peter Brian Hegseth (born June 6, 1980) is a former Executive Director of Vets For Freedom and a senior counterinsurgency instructor at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul with the Minnesota National Guard. Hegseth has made multiple appearances on national television as a military analyst and lost the Republican party endorsement for the United States Senate election in Minnesota, 2012 to Kurt Bills. He is currently the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America.

Life and work
Hegseth attended Forest Lake Area High School in Forest Lake, Minnesota and received his Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University in 2003. At Princeton, Hegseth was the editor of the Princeton Tory, a conservative student-run publication. While at Princeton, Hegseth also served as a guard on the basketball team, scoring 36 points and accumulating 13 assists in 42 games over his four-year career.

Following graduation, Hegseth was commissioned as an infantry officer into the U.S. Army National Guard in 2003. In 2004, his unit was called to Guantanamo Bay where he served as an infantry platoon leader. He was awarded the Army Commendation Medal. Shortly after returning from Cuba, Hegseth volunteered to serve in Baghdad and Samarra, where he held the position of Infantry Platoon Leader and, later in Samarra, of Civil-Military Operations Officer. During his time in Iraq, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Valor Device, Combat Infantryman Badge, and a second Army Commendation Medal.

Hegseth's civilian employment during his non-deployment National Guard service was with Bear Stearns.

Upon return from Iraq, Hegseth worked briefly at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. In 2007, he left the conservative think tank to take the helm of Vets For Freedom as executive director. At that time, the organization had no staff, limited membership and no budget. By 2008, after eighteen months of Hegseth's leadership, the group had grown to 95,000 members with a $9 million budget and a dozen staff members. While leading Vets For Freedom from 2007–2010, he was also a Fox News Channel military analyst and made multiple television appearances on the Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC. Hegseth is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to the National Review Online, as well as the author of many editorials in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New York Post, and The Washington Times.

Personal life
Hegseth was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and raised in Forest Lake, Minnesota. He married his second wife, Samantha, in the spring of 2010. The couple had a son, Gunner, in June 2010, and are expecting a second child.

Education

 * 1999 Forest Lake High School, Forest Lake, MN
 * 2003 Bachelor of Arts degree, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ