The Pentagon has hit back at criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a U.S. airman died during a rappelling demonstration at a University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) football game.
Jackie Singh, a former Democrat campaign cybersecurity expert, posted on X: "Thanks @PeteHegseth @SecWar for yet another pointless and tragic recruiting spectacle."
"It is disgraceful that anyone would use the tragic death of a service member to try to score political points," Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in response, in a statement provided to Newsweek.
Investigators are looking into why the deceased service member, named as Technical Sergeant Ian Patterson, died while descending more than 50 meters from the rafters of the Alamodome in San Antonio before start the start of a game between UTSA Roadrunners and the U.S. Naval Academy.
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Footage captured on Saturday showed a person rappelling down a rope before apparently losing control and hitting the turf at speed. The match went ahead with a short delay after the airman was taken from the pitch by emergency services.
Patterson was part of the 6th Combat Training Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio, and officials said he was a native of Fort Stewart, Georgia, who had spent 15 years in the military.
He "mattered immensely," and the "tragedy is felt deeply across the 57th Wing," said U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Scott Mills, the commander of the Nevada-based wing.
However, Singh was not the only Democrat to criticize the decision to have service personnel rappel from the roof of the Alamodrome.
"This ridiculous military showboating at football games needs to STOP," said Democrat strategist, Chris Jackson, adding that a man lost his life "because some Hegseth-like official apparently thought putting on a macho spectacle for people who came to watch FOOTBALL was a brilliant idea."
Hegseth has driven a campaign to promote traditional, masculine ideals within the U.S. military and bake in what he termed a "warrior" ethos to the active-duty ranks.
But chunks of the U.S. military train extensively to rappel from aircraft, and zipping down from great heights in front of a large crowd has been a custom of military and civilian events across both Democrat and Republican administrations for decades.
U.S. military personnel have performed public rappelling demonstrations on at least five occasions during Trump's current administration, including ahead of a game between UTSA and the U.S. Army at the Alamodome in November 2025, and from a Black Hawk helicopter in August this year.
During former President Joe Biden's term, U.S. Air Force pararescuemen rappelled to hand over the game ball for a Golden State Warriors' Hoops for Troops match in San Francisco in November 2024.
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In November 2013, while then-President Barack Obama was in office, six U.S. service members showed off several different rappelling techniques—including sliding head first down the rope—at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee.
These events are "not specific to Secretary Hegseth, though I'm sure he supports them as a way of demonstrating the military's warrior skills," said Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Reserve colonel and a senior adviser with the U.S. think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"Rappelling and parachuting are the ground-force equivalents of aviation demonstration teams like the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds," he told Newsweek. "Those have also had fatal accidents in the past but have learned from them and, at some level, accept the risks as the price of doing business."
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: John Fitzpatrick and Tony Phillips.