“Folks are shocked,” said a current DOD official. “He’s just a Fox News personality that’s never worked in the government.”

POLITICO spoke with six current and former Pentagon officials on Wednesday, the morning after Trump named Hegseth as his pick to run DOD. Most were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the choice.

They, like many other officials in Washington, were not only surprised by the move but also skeptical that Hegseth would be able to run such a complex bureaucracy.

“It’s a deadly serious job and this strikes me as a mainly performative person who is best known for talking about wokeness and not doing anything meaningful on national security post serving in the military,” said another DOD official.

“It is a massive bureaucracy, you have to understand how that works to support national security around the globe,” the official added. “It is tedious and challenging and it is not at all related to getting on Fox News and pontificating.”

The selection of Hegseth also raised concern that giving the reins to a relative newcomer could scare off contenders for the more than 80 other Senate-confirmed jobs at the Pentagon, since the defense secretary typically retains decision-making authority and can disregard the advice of his subordinates.

“Would you be comfortable being the undersecretary for policy if that guy is secretary of defense?” said the former DOD official. “What 55-year-old national security-focused businessman or woman would want to be the undersecretary for acquisition to this guy when he has decision-making power?”

In response to POLITICO’s request for comment, the Trump transition team did not address questions about Hegseth’s experience, but instead sent a copy of the president-elect’s statement announcing the nomination.

Others said they were still sorting through the ramifications of the choice with almost no prior knowledge of the nominee. They described conducting furious Google searches to learn about their possible new boss.

“I barely knew who he was,” said the second DOD official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I was reacting to a bio page.” Several foreign diplomats said on Tuesday night that they rush ordered Hegseth’s latest book online after his nomination was announced, as allies are scrambling to get to know someone they had never heard of and have no idea what his priorities might be.

Many current and former DOD officials had viewed Trump’s first round of national security picks for his new cabinet, including the announcement of Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida as national security adviser and plans to choose Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state, as a sign that the new administration would tap more mainstream and conventionally credentialed candidates for top jobs.

But Hegseth, who not only has railed against Pentagon diversity and inclusion programs but has also called on Trump to fire his top military officers such as Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown, set off fears that the new secretary was ready to torch the agency.

The news came just hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump transition team was looking at a draft executive order to create a “warrior board” of retired military officers to review sitting generals and admirals, which had already unnerved DOD officials.

“It seems consistent with what people working for potential targets already feared,” the first DOD official said. “This is potentially a move by a smarter, savvier Trump administration that is looking to dress up going after the ‘woke generals’ under the veneer of some process of national security rationale.”

Some officials expressed concern that Hegseth might come into the building with a hatchet aimed at axing programs without getting a lay of the land first.

“There is a lot of bureaucracy that needs to be addressed and thinned out,” a third DOD official acknowledged. “But something exists for a reason. If you’re disarming a bomb, you need to know which wires to cut, you can’t just cut all of them.”

The official hoped that Hegseth might change his approach once he began receiving classified national security briefings during the transition. “Once they get that initial brain dump and see all that’s going on behind the curtains, I think it is a step back and an ‘oh my god’ moment for them to kind of realize all that they don’t know,” the person said.

Hegseth’s personal life was already coming under fire in the hours after Trump announced the pick. The Fox News host has reportedly engaged in multiple extramarital affairs. In 2018, when he was said to be under consideration to be Trump’s veteran affairs secretary, American Public Media reported that Hegseth’s political action committee in Minnesota spent a third of its money on Christmas parties and that the television host once paid his brother, who had no professional experience, $108,000 to work for him at a non-profit.

The qualification that has typically made Pentagon chiefs successful “is legislative or bureaucratic experience — after all, DOD is a $780 billion business with 2 million employees and a large and intrusive board of directors (the Congress),” said Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. “Also, given the severe consequences of mistakes when dealing with the use of violence on behalf of the country, winning bipartisan support is a valuable asset.”

Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy during the Bush administration, said that even long-tenured officials like Robert Gates and Leon Panetta had found that nothing prepared them for the enormity of the job of running the Pentagon. “After the presidency, I think it is the second hardest job in the executive branch,” he said.

With the Pentagon helping allies fight two wars and facing the prospect of fighting one of its own in the coming years in the Middle East, Hegseth’s lack of executive branch experience put doubts in the minds of some that he’d know who to call if he had to pick up the phone in a crisis.

“It is not a building that moves on a time or changes easily,” the first DOD official added. “You’re going to come up against a thousand walls.”