Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to address hundreds of U.S. troops on Wednesday, previewing forthcoming moves and touting his agenda one year to the day after delivering an unorthodox, highly partisan lecture to nearly all of the military’s generals and admirals.
Hegseth’s team on social media called Wednesday’s event his “State of the Force” address and said it will be “HISTORIC,” without providing any detail about what will be discussed. Spokespeople for Hegseth did not immediately answer questions about the itinerary.
The secretary began the day exercising outside the Pentagon with several hundred service members, seemingly all clad in “THIS IS WAR” T-shirts that highlight the Trump administration’s rebranding of the Defense Department as the War Department.
Wednesday’s address, scheduled for 3 p.m. at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, is expected to include primarily junior military officers and enlisted leaders. It occurs with November’s midterm elections weeks away and as the Pentagon is mired in a deeply unpopular seven-month war with Iran that President Donald Trump initially said would take a few weeks to win.
Trump and Hegseth have sought to portray the war as finished, even as tens of thousands of military personnel remain deployed and intermittent Iranian attacks on U.S. personnel have resulted in recent injuries. Both men have repeatedly lashed out at those who have raised concerns about the conflict’s long-term implications, including heavy usage of Navy warships that will require extended maintenance and the partial depletion of key U.S. munitions and air defenses.
Hegseth, a former mid-ranking officer in the Army National Guard, has touted his focus on lethality throughout his tenure as defense secretary and has accused past Pentagon leaders of not caring enough about winning the nation’s wars. He has forced out scores of top military leaders who carried orders issued by the Biden administration, which he has accused of fostering, in his words, a “weak and woke” culture throughout the military.
One effort that Hegseth may address Wednesday is his plan for cuts to the total number of generals and admirals in the military. U.S. officials said Tuesday that he is expected to soon announce up to a 20 percent reduction, up from an initial plan last year to cut at least 10 percent. The active-duty military currently has about 850 generals and admirals overseeing more than 1.3 million troops on active duty, with nearly 800,000 more in the National Guard and reserve components.
The Pentagon also said Tuesday that Hegseth will stop appointing civilian professors to tenured positions at its service academies, including the Naval Academy in Maryland, the Air Force Academy in Colorado and the Army’s U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York. The decision was reported earlier Tuesday by the Daily Wire.
One faculty member, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, said that while the move was first reported as under consideration over the summer, Tuesday’s announcement caught many at the academies by surprise.
Planning for Hegseth’s address at Quantico last year initially sowed fear and confusion among many service members, with few details provided as the defense secretary issued short-notice orders to hundreds of top officers and enlisted leaders to travel from headquarters around the world to listen to him.
At that summit, military leaders listened mostly in silence as Trump and Hegseth criticized their predecessors and aired grievances. Hegseth told those assembled that there would be more leadership changes to come and that he didn’t want to see “fat troops,” including “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”
Since then, Hegseth has removed a number of other top military leaders, focusing in particular on the Army, his former branch of service. In April, he fired Gen. Randy George, the chief of staff, and two other officers without providing a reason.
Hegseth later forced another top Army officer, Gen. Christopher Donahue, into retirement, stonewalling a behind-the-scenes effort within the Army and Congress to extend the career of the influential general. Donahue submitted retirement paperwork after months of uncertainty about his future and as Hegseth’s team planned to downgrade his role and many others across the services to three-star commands.
Peter Feaver, an expert at Duke University on civil-military affairs, wrote in an opinion piece Tuesday for War on the Rocks that generals who sat through last year’s address handled the partisan nature of the event well, listening respectfully without acting politically. The younger, less experienced audience at this year’s summit, he added, will face a similar test.
“We will see,” Feaver wrote, “whether service leaders can get a much less prepared cohort to meet the exacting nonpartisan standard that previous military leaders thought essential and that the force has demonstrated through its history.”
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