At Quantico, Hegseth delivered ‘an inane message of little merit.’ It ‘could have been an email’
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech to top generals was supposed to serve as a rallying cry for military exceptionalism — but it didn’t land that way with many of the people it was targeting.
Numerous defense officials — who watched senior brass scramble to Washington and then sit through a partisan speech from President Donald Trump and a return to old-school military standards by Hegseth — were left wondering why the event had occurred at all.
“More like a press conference than briefing the generals,” said one defense official, who, like others, was granted anonymity due to fears of retribution. “Could have been an email.”
Defense officials, in the Pentagon and at bases around the world, spent much of Tuesday trying to make sense of the last-minute gathering at the Quantico base in Virginia. Hegseth called out “fat generals,” and, separately, pushed fitness standards that could limit women in combat roles, while Trump offered his justification for sending the military into American cities.
The 90-minute event — which featured military officials who swore an oath to the Constitution attending something more akin to a campaign rally — had the feeling of a Hollywood production. Trump even instructed officials to “just have a good time.”
The meeting took place hours before a likely government shutdown, and struck some officials as a distraction that threatens to shift the military’s focus away from foreign threats toward an unprecedented domestic role.
“Not quite a loyalty test, but … on the spectrum of loyalty to ideology,” said a second defense official. “Total waste of money.”
Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine suggested Russian and Chinese officials would worry that hundreds of American generals and admirals had gathered together. But some current and former defense officials instead feared the security risk of sticking almost all of America’s top officers in the same room. And they dismissed Hegseth’s effort to bolster the military’s aggressive image through grooming standards and ending diversity programs.
“It‘s a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing,” said a former senior defense official. “It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.” [Continue reading…]