Military Top Brass Gets Scolded by Hegseth and Stupefied by Trump

In a speech before hundreds of the United States’ top military brass, President Trump delivered the headline at minute :44 when he said, “And I told Pete [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth], we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” In the most ominous words we’ve ever heard from a president, he told them:

”America is under invasion from within…no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms. At least when they're wearing a uniform, you can take them out. These people don't have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We're stopping it very quickly…This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room...”

Trump has chosen Portland, Oregon, as the next city to be invaded, first by his federalizing the Oregon National Guard, and then apparently by sending in the U.S. military. Portland “looks like a war zone”, he said in the speech. In response to Oregon’s governor, who told Trump he is not needed, “I said, well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like World War Two. Your place is burning down.” That is false, and apparently he did see the wrong videos; the rightwing channels had been showing footage from five years ago when there was rioting in the city after the George Floyd murder uprisings.

At great cost and the greater risk of concentrating the entire leadership of the U.S. military in a single location, Hegseth had ordered all generals, admirals, and top-ranked non-commissioned officers to report to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, to dictate to them rules they must institute to transform the military into war fighters. That entails getting rid of “woke” practices that promoted leadership “based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts”; that tolerated “fat or unfit or under-trained troops”; that permitted beards, long hair, and “superficial individual expression.”

Not to belittle Hegseth, who served three tours in various locales and was awarded two bronze stars, but it was an extraordinary juxtaposition: hundreds of officers, many of them combat unit leaders who had led battalions, brigades, divisions or fleets and risen to top ranks, stars gleaming on their shoulders, being lectured by a brash young man who, while promoted to major in the National Guard, had never led more than a platoon as a second lieutenant – about 44 men and women.

Still, he was organized and well-prepared to deliver a polished message. One can only wonder what he must have then thought when he heard just two days before the event that President Trump wanted to attend and speak, too. In front of all these serious, disciplined men and women, Hegseth must have wondered if Trump was going to deliver one of his meandering monologues leaving the audience to wonder what is wrong with the man.

Yes he was.

Trump spoke for an hour and eleven minutes, rambling from one subject to another and back again about subjects that had nothing to do with the sea of uniforms before him: winning in court against the Associated Press about re-naming the Gulf of Mexico (he didn’t; he lost), President Biden and use of an autopen, Trump’s own signature (“I love my signature, everybody loves my signature”), paper quality in the White House (“We have beautiful paper, the gorgeous paper”), and how careful he is on stairs these days.

He told his listeners of all the wars he has ended and repeatedly returned to that subject, the Nobel prize he won’t get (“they'll give it to some guy that didn't do a damn thing”), tariffs (“I said, tariff is my favorite word. I love the word tariff”), and how many counties he won compared to the Democrats in the 2024 election.

He must have given pause to the admirals present when he said,

“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way… your secretary likes it and I'm sort of open to it…I tell you, it's something we're seriously considering.”

This in the new age of drones and anti-ship missiles. Battleships are entirely outmoded, a realization that became apparent even toward the end of World War II. But Trump is nostalgic:

”And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and man, nothing was going to stop, they were 20 deep and they were in a straight line and there was nothing going to stop them.”

He went on at some length:

”And I'm not a fan of some of the ships you do. I'm a very esthetic person. I don't like some of the ships you're doing esthetically. They say, oh, it's stealth. I say that's not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you're stealth.”

He continuously insulted President Biden, which is what led to the discussion of stairs:

”Every day, the guy's falling down stairs. I said it's not our president. We can't have it. I'm very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for — like I'm on stairs like these stairs, I'm very — I walk very slowly.”

As for President Obama,

”I had zero respect for him as the president, but he would bop down those stairs — I've never seen, da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he'd go down the stairs, wouldn't hold on. I said, great, I don't want to do it.”

Listening in stone-faced silence, the men and women in their hundreds must have had the same thought: 'I was made to fly thousands of miles for this?'.

Retired generals and admirals spoke to those still in the ranks – they know many who they have guided thanks to the military’s mentorship programs. Because the military strives to stay non-partisan, they could not be outspoken about the speech, but the adjective that was heard most frequently was “embarrassing”.

It was worse than that. This was not a crowd of mid-country worshippers attending one of his campaign rallies. Trump was going before a serious, no-nonsense crowd of great accomplishment. At moments of his speech, Trump would – one could tell by the wording – switch to the prepared script to praise those before him, congratulating them for exceeding recruitment goals after a long period of shortcoming, for the B2 bombing run against Iran, for being the best there is. What does it say about him, though, that he didn’t have the sense to stick to his carefully written script about promised support, plans for ships and weapon production, increased NATO spending, etc.? What sort of mind chooses to wander aimlessly and babble irrelevantly to this august assemblage?

There was a good deal of commentary in the media that Trump is showing more than just a disorderly mind, that "the president is not well". How are we somehow to get through more than three years of this, especially as he increasingly becomes tyrannical?

What is Hegseth telling the military for whom Trump plans “a big thing for the people in this room“ when he sends their troops into our cities to combat his imagined "enemy from within"? Hegseth demands a military trained to fight:

"We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters… We let our leaders fight their formations, and then we have their back."

How well suited is this training that Trump, who has no conception of military service, would turn loose against Americans? Capt. Margaret Donovan (Ret.), U.S. Army, a JAG officer who gave legal advice on more than a thousand airstrikes and other lethal engagements, reacted to the jettisoning of rules of engagement thus:

"It stands against everything, every norm, every ethic, every moral that these military commanders have developed, learned, and hopefully imposed on their junior soldiers throughout their careers."

get physical

In other respects, the reforms Hegseth demands are mostly physical, coming from someone who obsessively does pull-ups with RFK Jr.

 All women in combat units must meet the same fitness standards as men.
  Across the branches of service, every member at every rank is required to take a PT test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements.
  A field test for combat arms units that must be executable in any environment at any time and with combat equipment.

"Standards must be uniform, gender neutral, and high. If not, they’re not standards. They’re just suggestions, suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed".

And for someone who was in the service in past decades (like this writer) to learn that the following is absent and needs to be restored, it says a lot about what the military has become:

"We’re empowering drill sergeants to instill healthy fear in new recruits, ensuring that future warfighters are forged. Yes, they can shark attack, they can toss bunks, they can swear, and yes, they can put their hands on recruits."

As for the Pentagon itself, Hegseth was not bashful:

"It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look…"

And…

"No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions, no more debris. As I’ve said before and will say again, we are done with that s**t. I’ve made it my mission to uproot the obvious distractions that made us less capable and less lethal."

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