In a fiery speech, the Pentagon chief solicited bids to build a new base, called for more focus on religion and said Elon Musk will help develop next-generation weapons.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled six new initiatives in an address to hundreds of U.S. troops Wednesday, calling for the establishment of a headquarters focused on drone warfare, soliciting interest in a future 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 senior-most leaders. Speaking this time to hundreds of mid-ranking officers and enlisted leaders, he again lambasted the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, the U.S. news media and liberal politicians while drawing a direct line between this event and the previous one.
“The previous administration forced out so-called toxic leaders in favor of promoting risk-averse, get-along to-go-along conformists,” Hegseth told the audience. “It was the true politicization of our military, stupid and dangerous.”
The Biden administration, he alleged at another point, “wanted politically correct generals,” adding that Trump administration officials “only want the top performing generals.” He specifically criticized former defense secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying that some of the diversity efforts adopted when they led the Pentagon were meant to create “politically correct quotas.”
Hegseth used profanity and recited scripture, touted his firing of scores of generals and admirals, 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. Congress has not, as yet, authorized the name change.
The address occurred as Hegseth’s Republican Party faces substantial headwinds heading into November’s midterm elections and the Pentagon remains mired in the deeply unpopular Iran war. Upon initiating the conflict seven months ago, both Hegseth and President Donald Trump said it would take a few weeks to win, despite the private misgivings of some senior military leaders.
Trump and Hegseth have sought to portray the war as finished now, 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 reserved several minutes of his presentation for attacking the “anti-American losers” in the news media who have published a number of revealing reports about the Trump administration’s management of the war and his stewardship of the Pentagon. The conflict, which the president began in concert with Israel on Feb. 28, has cost tens of billions of dollars, damaged or destroyed several U.S. facilities and aircraft throughout the Middle East, left more than 800 American troops wounded and resulted in the death of at least 19 others.
Hegseth, himself a former mid-ranking officer in the Army National Guard, also continued to tout his focus on “lethality,” 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 number crunchers say we fired 10 percent of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right,” he said. “And I know because I directed it that we’ve also reduced the overall number of general officer slots by an additional 10 percent. So yes, 20 percent reduction across the board.”
The active-duty military 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.
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 the military top officers and enlisted leaders to travel from headquarters around the world to listen to him.
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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 on civil-military affairs at Duke University, said that the partisan nature of Hegseth’s speech last year left open the possibility that the younger audience this year might respond inappropriately. They passed that test, he said.
“They listened respectfully but did not cheer or boo the partisan lines in the speech,” Feaver said. “Americans should celebrate the fact that we have a professional military committed to preserving its nonpartisan status.”
Feaver noted that Hegseth’s policy proposals will require buy-in from lawmakers to be realized and funded.
“I wonder if the team has socialized these ideas with stakeholders in Congress,” Feaver said. “If not, there is a lot of work to be done before they produce the benefits he promised.”
The new drone warfare headquarters, called Autonomous Warfare Command, will spring from a fledgling effort that Hegseth named Project Agincourt. It’s a reference to a battle in which English forces, though vastly outnumbered, beat French adversaries in 1415 while relying on creative employment of longbows.
In a memo released after Hegseth’s speech, the secretary said that the effort will experiment with drone prototypes and develop a “repeatable procurement system whose output is not a particular drone, but the ability to adapt in combat.” It will be led by Owen West, a Marine Corps veteran who oversees the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. Hegseth’s memo said the Pentagon will “collaborate directly with Congress to secure necessary legislation” for the headquarters, with an aspirational launch date of October 2027.
In another memo released after the speech, Hegseth established the new effort to build a “new, highly hardened joint military installation” within the domestic United States. A nationwide effort to evaluate locations will follow, the memo said, in a project that “is about doing something bold, beautiful, and world-class for the great Americans who wear our Nation’s uniform.”
The base-building effort follows decades of retrenchment in which the military has reduced in scale or closed numerous military installations across the country to save money. It was not immediately clear how the Pentagon will pay for the effort or where in the United States the Trump administration may consider.
Speaking directly to the nation’s governors in his address, Hegseth said: “If your state wants the honor of hosting 15 to 25,000 of America’s great troops, show us why and how you’re going to do it. Cutting through the red tape, offering up the land, and rolling out the red carpet for our military families.”
Hegseth’s initiative that relies in part on tech titans will be known as Project Meridian, and initially include Luckey, the co-founder of Anduril; Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and former head of the controversial, cost-cutting U.S. DOGE Service; and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who has long shown an interest in next-generation technology. Hegseth said Wednesday they are “three of our nation’s best minds,” and pointed them out in the audience.
It was not immediately clear how Musk and Luckey will manage collaborating with the government while their companies and their competitors compete for government contracts — a potential conflict of interest.
Hegseth said Project Meridian will be “futuristic on purpose,” with work “focused on discovering, developing, and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and grandchildren will need in their lifetimes, without any creative limitations or restrictions on any future battlefield, from under the Earth to beyond the Moon.”
The development of new officer training programs follows months of Hegseth targeting Ivy League schools and other institutions that have educated prospective and current military officers. The Trump administration has accused numerous academic institutions of harboring a liberal bias. The “America’s Corps of Cadets” program, Hegseth said, will add new or expanded training at Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University, Liberty University, Tuskegee University and Hillsdale College.
The resiliency effort announced by Hegseth on Wednesday is called “FORTRESS America,” short for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply and Survivability. Hegseth said in a related memo that he wants to end reliance on foreign supply chains, something that other U.S. officials, including President Joe Biden, also have emphasized.
The FORTRESS effort also will ensure that every major U.S. base can generate its own power and stay online if civilian infrastructure nearby is compromised or sabotaged, Hegseth’s memo said. It also will build “deep strategic reserves of munitions, fuel, medicine and blood sufficient to fight through disruption” in times of crisis.
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