The ex-Fox News host railed against decades of work to diversify the all-volunteer military as he announced initiatives to effectively exclude women from combat roles and relax protections against hazing and bullying of troops
More than 800 of America’s top military leaders sat silent and showed no reaction as ex-Fox News presenter turned Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth told them he was issuing a series of new directives that will make it harder for women to serve in combat and easier for personnel to engage in hazing and bullying without repercussions during an unprecedented gathering of flag-rank officers at a Marine Corps base in Virginia on Tuesday.
The Secretary of War — a title not used by the head of the U.S. military establishment since 1947 but revived by President Donald Trump earlier this month — told the group of admirals, generals, and their senior enlisted advisers he was “ending the war on warriors” and complained that too many of their peers had been put in their roles “for the wrong reasons” including their race and gender.
Standing in front of a large American flag backdrop, he attacked by name several of the leaders’ retired peers, telling them that the department’s “compass heading” was “clear.”
“Out with the Chiarelli, the McKenzies and the Milleys and in with the Stockdales the Schwartzkopfs and the Pattons,” he said, denigrating former Army Vice Chief of Staff General Peter Chiarelli, ex-U.S. Central Command commander and Marine Corps General Kenneth McKenzie Jr, and ex-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and Army General Mark Milley, each of whom has been critical of Trump or his administration.
“The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies,” he added.
Hegseth also groused about efforts to open up combat roles to women and initiatives to “weed out so-called toxic leaders” and blamed “foolish and reckless” politicians for having “set the wrong compass” and causing the Pentagon to lose its way.
Hegseth, an Iraq War veteran who attained the rank of Major in the Army National Guard but became a critic of the Pentagon’s efforts to open up military service to women, racial minorities and LGBT+ persons, said the War Department must “restore a ruthless, dispassionate and common sense application of standards” that are “uniform, gender neutral and high.”
He told the assembled leaders he was issuing a directive to ensure that “every designated Combat Arms” role across all branches “returns to the highest male standard only,” all but reversing a 2015 directive from then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to open all combat roles to women.
“If you do not meet the male level physical standards for combat positions … it’s time for a new position or a new profession,” he said. “If women can make it excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”
The War Secretary also claimed — without offering evidence — that the Pentagon had lowered standards “to hit racial quotas as well” and said the revised standards he was promulgating are based on what he called the “1990 test,” which compares today’s standards to those in 1990, a time when women were barred from combat roles and LGBT+ persons were banned from serving.
“The 1990s test is simple. What were the military standards in 1990 and if they have changed, tell me why was it a necessary change based on the evolving landscape of combat, or was the change due to a softening, weakening or gender based pursuit of other priorities? 1990s seems to be as good a place to start as any,” he said.
I wonder how generals feel about being told how to do their jobs by a major.
I’m sure they are hyped, delighted, and filled with espirit de corps about all of this.
Espirit de coup d’état?
Won’t happen. As much as it should, it won’t happen. Unfortunately a lot of our military are cheering this on, even if their leadership is luke-warm about it.
“Hey you fat fucks, none of this girl shit. We’re going to all do push-ups and jack off to the good kind of porn and get cool Hearts of Iron 4 tattoos and pray to the Real Jesus and any of you phony losers who complains can hit the fucking bricks! Now lets go fight some wars because we love peace!”
Punches the air
Chops crotch repeatedly
Tries to do a stage dive, hesitates, and walks it back pretending to look cool about it
Yeah, I can’t imagine why this fell flat.
I ain’t gonna read it but did he really? I was wondering when the broke it up did anyone applaud?
Starting to think the military may be the last hope of true allegiance to the flag.
Trump needs a war to declare martial law and then undermine elections. He can then claim he’s only doing what Zelenskyy has done.
Think we also saw this tried in South Korea didn’t we?
He can claim anything, but Ukraine’s constitution doesn’t allow elections during war. America’s does.
In the backdrop of this, does that even remotely matter?
It only matters insofar as the courts uphold that; and even if they do, Courts have no enforcement arm to ensure adherence.
This will ultimately rest on how much individual states or these military generals want to unilaterally push back.
Ukraine’s constitution doesn’t allow elections during war
Seems like a big flaw in the Constitution, given that the public now has no way to remove leadership that’s running a war this badly.
Badly? Even Trump, Putin’s good buddy, has said that he believes Ukraine can not just win, but take back all the territory that Russia took. So, how is that running a war “badly”?
Seems useful at the moment, given Russia’s penchant for election interference.
Moldova just elected an EU-friendly government in a landslide, despite perpetual claims of election interference.
Poland and Romania also just put up a staunch anti-Russian nationalists.
The notion that Russia can rig elections in their favor hasn’t born out over the last two years. Anti-Russia candidates are sweeping Eastern Europe.
Is Moldova at war?
And how did Moldova achieve it? By booting out the obvious traitors.
A model for America.
Is Moldova at war?
Does it matter?
And how did Moldova achieve it?
They were the incumbent party and they grew their majority by pinning economic decline on the Russian invasion of their neighbor.
By booting out the obvious traitors.
The BEP wasn’t booted out. They have the second highest majority of MPs in Parliament.
A model for America.
:-/ Do you know anything about Moldovan politics?
The notion that Russia can rig elections in their favor hasn’t born out over the last two years.
Doesn’t mean they haven’t been trying
Which country should be holding elections, on these terms? It seems like everyone gets to claim a rival state is meddling in their politics.
Ukraine is in a situation where a war is either being run well, or Ukraine doesn’t exit. There’s no real third option. The U.S., on the other hand, could run a war badly for decades with it’s wealth and geographic isolation propping it up.
Ukraine is in a situation where a war is either being run well, or Ukraine doesn’t exit.
If that’s your personal opinion, that’s fine and cool. The idea that nobody actually living in Ukraine gets to evaluate the quality of their leadership or the relative appeal of their civil ministers until some kind of peace accord is struck (with the presumable caveat that there can never be peace until the whole country is retaken, I guess?) leaves you with a country governed by military dictatorship indefinitely.
The U.S., on the other hand, could run a war badly for decades with it’s wealth and geographic isolation propping it up.
Aside from the more obvious reasons, the nagging fact that Bush didn’t pounce on 9/11 to make himself Prez 4 Lyfe suggests they weren’t properly prepared to exploit the attack for their own benefit.
But we’re looking at the wages of the Long War as we speak. All our wealth and geographic insulation isn’t saving us from the harsh economic realities of endless conflict. We’ve got a nation flush with unemployed veterans who are leaping at the chance to join the Trump Gestapo for a six figure salary. We’ve got an admin stuffed to the brim full of FOX News talking heads, because none of them have “Lost One Too Many Battles” branded on their resumes. Our economy is increasingly seven tech oligarchies in trench coats, trading the same trillion dollar check back and forth between them to give the appearance of growth, even as they’ve been laying off their best and brightest and consolidating their business around a model of digital landlordism.
All of this can be traced back to our decision to burn the livelihoods of millions of Americans and trillions in productive capital on an endless war. Trump is us paying the interest on that enormous debt.
And the only thing that kept us from getting to 2025 faster was twelve years of Presidents who gradually and painstakingly extracted us from those conflicts overseas. That was the value of the last twelve election cycles.
Ukraine doesn’t have our runway and its burning up a lot faster than the US did after 9/11. Plenty of people on the ground see this for what it is. The Ukraine that existed before 2022 (really, before 2014) is fully evaporated. What we have now is this husk, being torn at by two global military factions.
So maybe elections don’t really matter anymore anyway. Democracy in Ukraine died when the pogroms began.
And the current leadership is incentivized to keep the war going, so they can stay in power.
Look at reporting for any coup that has ever happened.
Take note of how those reports talk about which side has support of the military.
“The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies,”
Trump can say and do whatever he wants … it really doesn’t matter
The thing of it is … what will the country and the rest of the US government ALLOW HIM to get away with.
Trump has no power … only the power that he is allowed to have … and so far, the US government, both political parties and the citizens have been more than willing to allow him to get away with whatever he wants.
I don’t blame some dumb orange politician … I blame the entire country for their shared collective stupidity.
That was how it was when the Trump appointed Secretary made a department-wide speech where I work. The half of the crowd that sat through the whole thing went mild. Or, at least, that’s what I heard. I was in the other half.
I seem to remember the secdef from Trump 1 relieving the captain of an aircraft carrier of his command because he made public that there was a COVID outbreak on board and no accommodations were being made. It culminated with Secdef Shitheel getting on the intercom of this carrier and belittling the former captain in front of the entire crew. There’s videos some of the crew took.
I don’t even remember this guy’s name, but I do remember that, like Hegseth, he had little military experience to speak of. Most of his career was corporate management or something.
That’s what this admin loves. Worthless corpos and shitheel influencers belittling and browbeating the people who actually hold things together.
The captain was Captain Brett Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. He was fired by the acting Secretary of the Navy, Thomas
MoldyModly. The fallout was so bad that his candy ass got relieved a few days later, but not before the ship had an infection rate of around 14% and at least a few deaths.I wish someone would stick all these people on a big ship, disable all communications equipment on board, tug it to Point Nemo, and just let it drift around there.
Launch the Brown October
Send them on a nice, long poop cruise with an extra helping of norovirus.
To be fair they’re silent because, the room was called to attention. When you’re at attention, you don’t clap, you stand still at attention.
Trump gave them permission to clap if they wished. I take it as something of a good sign that none of them broke norms and joined in.
In a better timeline the top brass rushed the stage & pulled Kegseth apart like a chicken.
Is that something you typically do to chickens where you’re from?
Only when we can’t afford a piñata
When they start talking, yeah.
He’s literally a 12 year old trying to talk tough in a CoD lobby…
I’m sure more bigotry, bullying and hazing will be super helpful with that perpetual recruiting crisis.
“The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies”…… holy shit.
We have a literal child running our military, we might honestly want to get ready for any shit China or Russia or Iran might try to pull while we have our pants down.
The children running the show are doing more damage than China or Iran could ever hope for. From an outside perspective it’s actually incredible how badly things are going for the US in only 9 months.
Russia, on the other hand, seem to be part of it.
I honestly just think Trump and many people in the federal government are foreign agents who are doing this intentionally to try to pave the way for a global surveillance state. I don’t think those politicians have any issue with China and Russia. I think they work together to push their vision of the future and have no loyalty to their country or people, even when it’s objectively much better and humanitarian like the U.S. simply put, they probably are trying to destroy America because it represents freedom and privacy in its most basic form. It’s the most liberal country in the world in many ways. It still is despite the massive bot farms and propaganda. If you talk to your average American, they will definitely tell you they support privacy, right to repair, free speech, protest, these types of things. Even with their trillions in propaganda they cannot make people believe something that’s fundamentally irrational.
What an insecure putz.
This meeting could have been a signal chat
This meeting could have been skipped entirely. And doing so would have been less embarrassing for everyone.
Every good rally ends in total silence.
The comedic timing of having this song queued up and ready to triumphantly play him off stage was impeccable.
Above FAFO and “do the honorable thing and resign,” I hope everyone in that audience remembers
- Never comply in advance
- Fuck you, make me
The German armed forces during the interwar period between WWI and WWII were pretty apolitical … they didn’t really care who was in power.
But it was filled with a bunch of professional idiots that only ever understood the world through the lens of war … they wanted to be in war, fighting, sending people to die, doing heroic things, killing people, blowing things up … they had a bloodlust for wanting to into battle and become the next historic Caesar or Alexander … they wanted to be remembered as a great warrior hero that did amazing things and lived to tell everyone about it all. They wanted to become that great general, some great army leader, someone who led a great battle and led his troops to some massive epic fight.
So when WWII started and they had a leader who was willing to send them to war … any war … for any reason … many of them didn’t care, all they cared about was that they were going to war to play war games.
A great example was General Irwin Rommel ‘The Desert Fox’ … he fought in WWI and he was highly disappointed in what happened because he didn’t do much. Then he hung on to the armed forces as long as he could after the war but had to give up and become a civilian again … and it drove him nuts. And when Germany started rearming, he was at the front of the line to reenlist and rejoin and didn’t care about the politics … he swung and joined whatever movement Nazi or otherwise in order to just get the war started. He got his big break, became a well known war celebrity and he didn’t care if he were Nazi, not Nazi, or supported Hitler or those that worked against the Nazis … all Rommel cared about was that he got to ride a tank, lead troops, blow things up, kill enemies and become famous.
German army leaders didn’t really start rebelling against their leadership until later in the war when they realized that they weren’t going to win.
“The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies,” he added.
WINK WINK
This was definitely something that could of been sent over email.
Its miniscule.
but I think after all those commanders getting corralled into what was essentially a coked out political campaign event. and listening to all the dumb shit that was said with 100% seriousness.
I think the chances of the Military doing a Coup against the US (Trump) Government, just rose from Zero, to nonzero.
Hegseth is such an insecure piece of shit just like his boss. What a fucking colossal waste of time and money for what was essentially a YouTube rant with homoerotic undertones about “male-level performance”.
I’d be laughing more if Trump and Hegseth weren’t actively looking to do their own version of Tiananmen Square.
Give him some credit. He’s probably only insecure during those rare times he’s forced to be sober.
