Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled six new initiatives in an address to hundreds of U.S. troops Wednesday, calling for the establishment of a new headquarters focused on drone warfare, soliciting bids for a new military base to be built somewhere in the United States, and touting the recruitment of billionaire tech titans Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to develop the next generation of weapons.
Hegseth, speaking at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, also announced his intent to establish a military office focused on religious programs, bolster the nation’s resiliency by fortifying domestic supply chains and create new cadet programs at five universities that he assessed are not dominated by liberal “woke” ideology.
The fiery speech, which Hegseth titled “State of the Force” and wants to make an annual occurrence, follows his unorthodox, highly partisan lecture a year ago to nearly all of the military’s generals and admirals. This time, he addressed hundreds of mid-ranking officers and enlisted leaders, and again lambasted the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, the U.S. news media and liberal politicians while drawing a direct line between the two events.
“I like to think last year’s Quantico speech was ‘Liberation Day’ for leaders, for you, to be the apolitical, hard-charging, commonsense, no-nonsense constitutional leaders that you joined the military to be,” Hegseth said. “You see, this stuff — it’s not rocket science, but it is a revival.”
Hegseth touted his firing of scores of senior military leaders since becoming defense secretary, accused journalists of “treason” for scrutinizing the Iran war and spoke harshly of service members who did not meet his notions of ideal.
“We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: No fatties, no t——-, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors,” Hegseth said, using a pejorative term for transgender people.
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.
The speech occurred as November’s midterm elections are weeks away and as the Pentagon is mired in the deeply unpopular seven-month Iran war that both Hegseth and President Donald Trump initially said would take a few weeks to win, despite the misgivings of some senior military leaders.
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, himself a former mid-ranking officer in the Army National Guard, continued to tout his focus on “lethality” during Wednesday’s presentation, and he revived claims that past Pentagon leaders cared too little about winning the nation’s wars.
As The Washington Post and others reported this week, Hegseth is working to reduce the total number of generals and admirals in the military by up to 20 percent, building on an initial plan, announced last year, to cut at least 10 percent of all senior leaders force-wide. 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. Hegseth alluded to his plans early in his remarks Wednesday.
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. The more junior officers and enlisted leaders in attendance Wednesday appeared to do much the same.
Peter Feaver, an expert at Duke University on civil-military affairs at Duke University, 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.”
The post Hegseth details new initiatives in partisan address to troops appeared first on Washington Post.
