Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent address to hundreds of senior military officers a “waste of time.”
Hegseth announced 10 additional directives designed to further his mission of restoring what he describes as the “warrior ethos” during his highly anticipated address to roughly 800 senior military leaders who came to Quantico, Virginia, from all corners of the globe on September 30.
“To call them back here, put them in a room, and it’s a perfect opportunity to talk about, where are we going in the 21st century with regards to our defense force? What do we need to develop in terms of weapons? What do we need to do in terms of change? What do we need to do in order to maintain America as the No. 1 military power on the face of the Earth?” Panetta said on Wednesday during an Axios Future of Defense event.
“Instead of that, they basically had a recruiting speech and a talk about the fact that we’re too wrapped up with woke other cultural issues,” he added. “They did not; they failed to address the major issues that the people in that room really do care about.”
“Oh, hell no, that’s a waste of time and money,” Panetta stated when asked whether he would have called all senior military officers to come to town for such a speech.
Hegseth directed senior military officials worldwide to travel to Virginia for his address last month. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and President Donald Trump also addressed the senior officers.
In his short tenure, the former Fox News host has transformed the department in several ways, ranging from the elimination of all diversity and inclusion-related programs and efforts to banning transgender service members to taking a much more active role in defending the homeland.
“This administration has done a great deal from Day One to remove the social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics, no more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” Hegseth told the senior generals and admirals. “No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris.”
HEGSETH PLEDGES TO RESHAPE WAR DEPARTMENT AFTER ‘DECADES OF DECAY’
Hegseth has also fired several senior military officers including the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the then-Chief of Naval Operations; Adm. Linda Fagan, then the Coast Guard commandant; Gen. James Slife, the former vice chief of staff of the Air Force; and Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, who was the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Both the Secretary of the Air Force Gen. David Allvin and U.S. Southern Command commander Admiral Adam Holsey have announced their early retirements.
Hegseth acknowledged senior military leaders were following orders from civilian leaders, but said his “job has been to determine which leaders simply did what they must to answer the prerogatives of civilian leadership and which leaders are truly invested in the woke department and therefore incapable of embracing the War Department.”
