Former commanding officer of the U.S. Army in Europe on fitness standards in the military

(CBS, KYMA) - Ret. Gen. Ben Hodges spoke with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation Sunday about fitness standards in the military.

Bringing up her previous interview with Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Brennan brought up Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's comments saying while he doesn't want to prevent women from serving in the military, he's now requiring everyone to meet the male standard.

This prompted Brennan to ask Hodges if he thinks Secretary Hegseth's change to the "male standard" is necessary, to which he said:

"I think this is completely unnecessary. I have 38 years in the Army, and we've served with women in all sorts of different environments and deployments, and I never had a case where a female soldier was not able to do what she had to do. So this is seems to me an unnecessary, almost a medieval approach, that doesn't reflect the requirements that we have for women and men who are intelligent, able to operate in a modern battlefield environment."

During the interview, Brennan and Hodges talked about Hegseth laying out what he talked about with senior military officials at Quantico last week "in terms of changing rules of engagement, those codes of conduct and standards to make war less brutal."

"We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement. Just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for war fighters," the secretary expressed.

When asked what he makes of the directives to officers, Hodges said:

"That's not going to help anybody accomplish their mission. I mean, when you think about the missions that we had in Afghanistan, for example, and I think that's where some of his experience comes from. It was to protect Afghan civilians so that they could reestablish government and secure themselves, and so it was not about how many Taliban could you kill. We had already tried that, and that didn't work. So the rules of engagement are not 'politically correct.' They're not intended to make it harder for soldiers or units to do their job. They actually are part of the mission. Why are we there? And so I don't have any experience where killing a lot of innocent people or violating the Geneva Convention is going to help accomplish the mission. I think that the idea that somehow is going to make us better and more effective by people not having to worry about the law is going to be bad for us in the long term as well, both psychologically for soldiers, but also the trust of the American people and of our allies and American forces, where we have always lived up to international law, and that is where a lot of the respect came from. We do not want to be like the Russian army, and they certainly don't worry about rules of engagement."

To watch more of Brennan's interview with Hodges, click here.