Speaker 1 (00:00):
Cut turn. Carry forward.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Let us pause for a word of prayer as we bow our heads and close our eyes. Dear God, we pause right now and ask that you bless today's town hall. Please guide our thoughts and actions and give our leaders discerning hearts, bold faith, and wise minds. Help all of us gathered here on this day to accomplish our goals while displaying your character and give us the capacity to do not just what is good but what is best. Remind us that despite our differences, we are always at our best when we stand together as one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. And during moments of uncertainty or stormy weather, help us realize that you still have the power to get us over, beyond, and through the troubled waters of life where it is in your mighty and liberating and holy name we pray on this day. Please receive it and let us all say together, amen and amen.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Please be seated. Ladies and gentlemen, the 29th Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Pete Hegseth.
Pete Hegseth (02:13):
Well, good afternoon. Thank you very much for your time. I want to echo what the chaplain said. All glory to God. I wake up every morning praying for the wisdom to see what is right and good and true and the courage to do it, and I know many of you do the same. It is an absolute honor to stand in front of all of you. I'm grateful. I'm humbled. Just the two weeks that I've been here is a solemn reminder in a couple of instances, but a solemn reminder of the very special nature of what the Department of Defense does and I've seen it in the Office of OSD, I've seen it across so many I've had a chance to interact with and so many more I want to interact with. This solemn commitment to the constitutional duty that we all have to protect and defend the constitution, that one administration leaves and another administration comes in and that can mean a lot of changes in the course of that based on elections that happen and new leaders and new executive orders and new directives and lawful orders.
(03:18)
But what I've been so incredibly impressed by is the professionalism of the men and women throughout the ranks who recognize who we work for, which is the American people and the defense of our nation. So I want to thank everybody watching, everybody here for being a part of that transition, which I've certainly recognized a great deal. I spent a lot of my career in the military, which is not as much as so many of you, trying to run away from the flagpole as quick as possible. Now it appears I am the flagpole.
(03:53)
I recognize and understand that distinction, but what I want to bring to this job and to the ethos is a recognition of the men and women who do the dirty work all day long for us here and across the world. Every time I speak or every time in my previous profession, I was on television and I got the bright lights and spotlight and people are looking to me, I always step back for a second and think about the men and women that I served with, the folks that are never going to be introduced, never are going to have a microphone, never going to be heard from, the men and women that you know, that you've served with who are the best of the best in our country. That's who we serve. I was on the phone late into the night last night talking to families of two soldiers who had a rollover at Fort Stewart.
(04:42)
I was on the phone with the families of the three that were lost in the UH-60 outside of the airport here in Washington DC. The costs and the consequences are very real and you know that. One of the things I wasn't prepared for is every couple of weeks we do an orders book at OSD where we literally approve the orders that go out. It sounds like a formality, but having been on the other end of those orders where those dates really mattered and what the mission was really mattered, I stare at my orders and say, "Where am I going and what does it mean and how long am I there?" That struck me like a thud. Every one of those signatures affects a human being whose mission needs to be important and vital to the national interest and to our department before I sign that book. And that's very much my commitment to you.
(05:30)
It's also my job, as President Trump asked me, to not maintain the status quo. We're going to take unconventional approaches. We're going to move fast, think outside the box, be disruptive on purpose to create a sense of urgency that I want to make sure exists inside this department. And that's not to impugn anybody who's been here or anybody who's sitting here or anybody who's watching. I don't have to tell you all that we live in very dangerous in a world with ascendant powers who, if they had their way, would love to be on the rise and reject the forces and capabilities and beliefs of the West. America is at the forefront of that. And wearing the uniform here at the department, it's our job to ensure we create the deterrent effect that maintains American dominance in the world. And there's a lot of folks, namely, and I've name checked it in public as well, the Communist Chinese who seek through their ascension a very different view of the world. And so we have to be urgent and we have to be ready about what that means and we're going to do that.
(06:36)
A part of how we're applying that is I've come in with three pillars that I've repeated before, but I want to say again of how we're approaching this from my level. Number one is restore the warrior ethos. Make sure that we get back to basics. Our job is to deter conflict and, if necessary, defeat and completely destroy, demoralize, and defeat our enemies. That's what we do. We do war fighting here at the Department of Defense and we want to restore that through a laser focus on readiness, lethality, and war fighting across the spectrum. I was on with the superintendents of West Point, Annapolis in the Air Force Academy yesterday. Hey, what are we doing there to drive those core principles? What are we doing here to drive those core principles from E-1 to…? I guess is it O-10? I don't know if I even said that. And I know this room is O-6 and below, which I was told was Junior. Where I come from, an O-6 ain't junior, so this is a new role for me too in that perspective.
(07:40)
And I went out to Fort Bliss, intentionally said, "Hey, E-7 and above and O-3 and above or O-4 and above, move out. I want to hear from the folks out here on this border mission. How is it impacting you and your family? What is your mission? Are you being utilized? How does it affect…? I actually think it adds to readiness because you're doing a real world mission, but how does it affect all those aspects?" Restoring the warrior ethos is critical and I think we've seen that already in the recruiting numbers. I think we've seen an enthusiasm and excitement from young men and women who want to join the military actively because they are interested in being a part of the finest fighting force the world has to offer and not doing a lot of other things that serve oftentimes too often to divide or distract.
(08:34)
It's about readiness, it's about staying focused, and I think you've seen that from a lot of the executive orders the president has issued that we have echoed and there can be confusion about that, but why do you get rid of something like DEI? Because from our perspective, it served a purpose of dividing the force as opposed to uniting the force. And this is something I've said quite publicly and what I want to be is transparent with this building and everyone who serves here, say the same thing in public that we say in private, which I hope you'll find from us. I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength.
(09:21)
I think our strength is our unity, our strength is our shared purpose. Regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race, in this department, we will treat everyone equally, we will treat everyone with fairness, we will treat everyone with respect, and we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission. That's how it has been. That's how it will be. Any inference otherwise is meant to divide or create complications that otherwise should not and do not exist. I've served across my career with amazing men and women from all backgrounds. They were at my congressional testimony, they've been in my office, they work with me and for me now. Their contributions are immense to this nation and are appreciated equally, as with everybody else, and that's the approach we're going to take.
(10:15)
So restore the ethos. The second one is rebuild our military. Our defense industrial base, our acquisitions process, how we rapidly field new technologies, how we learn from conflicts around the globe, how we match what we fund to capabilities and effects. There's a lot of programs around here that we spend a lot of money on that when you actually war game it don't have the impact you want them to. One of the benefits I have is I don't have any special interests. I don't have a background invested in any systems or services. I'm agnostic to that. It means I'm up to take a lot of arrows and I'm prepared to do so. That's fine. We need the best systems in the hands of war fighters where they need it to the COCOMs to deter and send the signals that when that fight comes, we're ready to win and win decisively.
(11:08)
That includes a Pentagon audit, which to the Marines out there, y'all got to figure it out and we appreciate that. Lean on me. We are going to focus heavily to ensure that at a bare minimum by the end of four years, the Pentagon passes a clean audit. The American taxpayers deserve that. They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it's spent and make sure it's spent wisely. It used to be that if you called for an audit, somehow you were undermining the department. I believe the exact opposite. I believe we are accountable for every dollar we spend and every dollar of waste we find or redundancy is a dollar we can invest somewhere else as President Trump has committed directly to rebuilding our nation's military. So rebuilding our military is key.
(11:57)
And then third is reestablishing deterrence. Unfortunately, over the last couple of years we've seen events that have occurred that have created the perception… Reality or perception, but I would argue more perception of American weakness, whether it's what happened in Afghanistan, by the way, which we're going to have accountability for, deserve accountability for what occurred in Afghanistan, for what happened on October 7th, the war that was unleashed in Ukraine. Chaos happens when the perception of American's strength is not complete, and so we aim to reestablish that deterrence and it starts with our own southern border. It starts with the defense of our homeland.
(12:37)
I think in some ways this department over time has felt like that's somebody else's mission. We've spent a lot of time, decades, my generation and yours, defending other people's borders across the world. Yet we've seen an invasion of our own from people all around the world… I'm sure many of them want to seek a better life. I understand that, but we also don't know who millions of them are, what their intentions are, why they're here. That creates a very real national security threat to the country. Border security is national security and as the president has told us, we're going to get 100% operational control of our southern border and that needs to be and will be a focus of this department.
(13:25)
I want to tip my hat to NORTHCOM. They've done an amazing job in the first couple of weeks here, taking that executive order which talked about the territorial defense of our country being core to the defense mission and implementing it, in some ways using existing processes that we have, which frankly are not robust enough, but also planning and looking forward to how we transition into a more permanent, effectively defense, repel and seal at our southern border so that we know exactly who's coming in and when they come in, they're coming in lawfully. And then also around the world prioritization. We have a lot of assets. We don't have unlimited assets, and so part of prioritizing is empowering our allies and partners. We need to lead the world, there's no doubt, and President Trump has been clear about that. America first means we're taking care of America first, but part of America first is empowering allies and partners to be combat multipliers, to add to the capabilities that we have.
(14:26)
I mean, that's foreign military sales, that's exercises, that's defense partnerships, but it's also reminding certain countries and certain regions of the world that America can't be the guarantor of everything forever in a world where we have to prioritize shifting to larger threats in certain moments. So you're going to see that kind of prioritization from us, which we believe will empower, invigorate, incentivize more burden-sharing from allies who are beloved to us, who we support, who also need to be prepared to step up. President Trump led on that with NATO in his first administration. We're going to do it again. We're going over to Europe next week for the NATO Ministerial to talk to our friends who have been and will continue to be our allies, but we also need to encourage them to continue to step up in their defense industrial base, in spending the kind of things we need to do here at home also.
(15:21)
Sort of to wrap up… And I've already gone longer than I should have. It really is, from our perspective, a back to basics moment. When President Trump chose me and he said, "Pete, I want you to run the defense department," his charge to me was return that department to its warfighting mission at its core, warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, accountability, and readiness, the bedrock of what we all understand our basic mission to be. I was at the Sergeant Majors Academy down at Fort Bliss just a couple days ago talking to 500 future sergeants major. They're the standard-bearers. What are the standards? And it starts with the basic stuff. It's grooming standards and uniform standards and training standards, fitness standards, all of that matters. It's almost like the broken windows theory of policing. When you ignore the small stuff from criminals… And I'm not saying if you violate grooming standards, you're a criminal.
(16:19)
The analogy is incomplete, but if you violate the small stuff and you allow it to happen, it creates a culture where big stuff you're not held accountable for. I think the same thing exists inside our services. Making sure at every level there is standards and accountability and that we live it at the highest levels as well, which is why we are going to look back at what happened in Afghanistan and hold people accountable. Not to be retrospective, not for retribution, but to understand what went wrong and why there was no accountability for it. Those types of things are examples, but I just appreciate the service so many of you give. I know so many people watching, it's the honor of a lifetime to come alongside you. No one will work harder. No one's going to attempt to be more transparent with the American people and with you. We do want to hear your feedback and we're going to hit the ground running.
(17:08)
And I'm grateful to President Trump for his leadership. We're going to rebuild the military and focus on the troops, so I'm happy to take any questions anybody might have and you can ask questions. It's okay. I think there's a microphone here and here, if you want to come up, sir, to the microphone so everybody can hear you. There's one right here. Yes, sir. I'm going to grab a water.
Speaker 5 (17:28):
Thank you, sir. Rich Laurier, Air Force A-10. You talked about deterrence. Do you see the department becoming more aggressive, more assertive in the gray zone to further deter China and Russia?
Pete Hegseth (17:42):
It's a good question. I…