Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says he’s planning to channel Elon Musk’s failed DOGE experiment to overhaul the Pentagon—“preferably with a chainsaw.”
Hegseth, 45, took his “Arsenal of Freedom” industry tour to Texas on Monday, visiting Musk’s SpaceX Starbase facility.
He has described the month-long nationwide tour as a “call to action to revitalize” America’s defense manufacturing industry and its workforce.
Speaking at Starbase, Hegseth spoke of sweeping through the Pentagon in the way Musk intended to do with federal spending and bureaucracy as part of his short-lived Department of Government Efficiency.
“This is about building an innovation pipeline that cuts through the overgrown bureaucratic underbrush, and clears away the debris, Elon-style, preferably with a chainsaw,” a fired-up Hegseth told Starbase employees.
The former Fox News host said he and Trump “have the backs of our war fighters” as they make life-and-death decisions on the battlefield.
“Now, I want this audience to know that we also have the backs of innovators who share that very same urgency.”
Hegseth said he had sworn in “10 more” military staff that day, adding, “I demand, and we demand that we arm our war fighters with overwhelming and lethal technology right now. Not a decade from now.”
Ironically, even Musk admitted last month that DOGE was a failure and had tarnished his brand.
Speaking to former DOGE employee and podcast host Katie Miller, Musk said, “We were a little bit successful, we were somewhat successful.” His embed with the Trump administration ended abruptly last June after he posted on X that President Donald Trump featured in the Epstein files.
When Miller asked Musk if he would do it again, he said, “I don’t think so. I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built—worked on my companies, essentially.”
Referring to the damaging consumer protests against his electric vehicle company, Tesla, as he slashed spending on welfare and health, Musk added, “The cars… they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”
While at Musk’s facility, Hegseth also said he was incorporating the billionaire’s troubled AI tool Grok into the Pentagon’s technology suite, alongside Google’s generative AI engine.
The timing is awkward, however, as Grokbot is in the news for letting users of the AI tool create sexualized images of children.
The resulting controversy has led to it being temporarily blocked in Malaysia and Indonesia, while the U.K.’s media regulator, Ofcom, announced on Monday it was launching a probe into Musk’s X platform, which could lead to a ban in that country.
Hegseth said Grok AI would go live in the Pentagon network later this month, promising it would not be “woke.”
“Very soon, we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department. Long overdue,” Hegseth said on Monday.
He told Musk’s employees that the Pentagon “would not employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars. We will judge AI models on this standard alone. Factually accurate, mission relevant, without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.”
The former Princeton politics graduate added, “Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us. We’re building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.”
Earlier on Monday, Hegseth spoke at the Lockheed Martin Facility in Fort Worth, where F-35 jets and other fighter aircraft are produced.
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