Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44.

 

News Analysis

Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44.

 

On an almost daily basis, thousands of words pour forth from the president’s mouth. Sometimes, he tucks in a wildly revealing insight about the direction he is taking the country.

 

Shawn McCreesh

By Shawn McCreesh

Reporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/us/politics/trump-military-brass-speech.html

Sept. 30, 2025

 

It was a speech unlike any other and just like every other.

 

The makings of it were strange and rare. Washington had raised a collective eyebrow last week when news began circulating that President Trump and his defense secretary had summoned the country’s military brass to a base in Virginia for an unexplained meeting. The timing was notable. This summons had come just as the president had started to act with a new aggressiveness to carry out his long-held and oft-stated desire to send the military into U.S. cities, ostensibly to reduce crime.

 

Several hundred military commanders turned up at Quantico on Tuesday morning. Some had flown in for it from places as far away as Germany, Brussels, Japan and South Korea. They sat mostly in silence as Mr. Trump talked for 73 minutes about the same things he talks about almost every day, no matter where he is or to whom he is speaking.

 

He talked to the generals about Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the infamous autopen. He talked about the media. He talked about tariffs and the border. He talked about the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner. He talked about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.

 

These were pretty much the same things he talked about a day earlier while standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the State Dining Room at the White House, which were the same things he talked about at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, which were the same things he talked about at Windsor Castle and at Chequers in England.

 

But if the generals were paying attention during minute 44 of the president’s speech Tuesday, they would have heard the fleeting but unmistakable sound of something new. Something different. 

 

It was at that moment that the president recounted a conversation with his defense secretary: “I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

 

We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, the president of the United States said.

 

On an almost daily basis, thousands of words pour forth from the president’s mouth. Sometimes, he tucks in a wild insight about the direction he is taking the country.

 

It can be hard to discern these moments for what they are. Partially that’s because we hear from Mr. Trump so often. He is on TV constantly. But it’s also because, in his second term more than ever, he has become so devoid of context. He seems unwilling or unable to modulate based on his audience, his setting or his circumstances.

 

If there had been any point to dragooning all those high-powered military commanders from around the country and the world to Virginia on Tuesday, it wasn’t exactly clear from Mr. Trump’s speech what that might have been. He would occasionally slip in observations or references that were more on topic, but these flights from his usual refrains seemed almost beside the point, if indeed there was one.

 

“I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships,” he said at one point. “By the way, the B-2 bombers were incredible,” he said at another point.

 

He mentioned that he used to love watching “Victory at Sea,” the old black-and-white television series about World War II.

 

There is also the matter of his delivery. It has become harder to perceive the occasionally revealing things the president says — like Tuesday’s admission that he saw American cities as “training grounds” for troops — because of the way he sometimes says them.

 

For a 79-year-old, he’s often shown a great deal of energy, but he seemed a bit sapped Tuesday. As his remarks went on and on, his voice took on a more monotonous quality. A day earlier, when he spoke at the White House while standing beside Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Trump sounded out of breath at times.

 

Even though Tuesday’s speech was not so different from all the others, he still seemed intent on winning over his audience with it.

 

“I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he said as he began. He acknowledged that members of the military were not meant to act like partisans, but told the crowd not to be concerned with such customs. “Just have a good time,” he instructed. “And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want.”

 

He told the brass, “You just feel nice and loose, OK?”

 

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

 

Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.

Trump says US is 'under invasion from within' in unusual speech to generals

A Novice Defense Secretary Lectures the Brass on What It Takes to Win

 

News Analysis

A Novice Defense Secretary Lectures the Brass on What It Takes to Win

 

Senior officers, summoned from around the world, are entrusted to manage complex military operations. They got a lecture on fitness and grooming standards.

 

Greg Jaffe

By Greg Jaffe

Reporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/us/politics/hegseth-military-officers.html

Sept. 30, 2025

 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has long maintained that the U.S. military badly needed a leader with dust on his boots to shake up a force that has gone soft and “woke.”

 

On Tuesday, he faced a room of hundreds of generals and admirals, whom he had summoned from across the globe, and made the case that he was that leader.

 

Mr. Hegseth’s vision of the military and what it should be was almost entirely defined by his 12 months of service in Iraq and his experience as a major in the Army National Guard.

 

Much of his address focused on the kinds of issues he would have dealt with as a young platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq or as a company commander in the Guard. He talked about grooming standards. “No more beards, long hair, superficial, individual expression,” he told the brass. “We’re going to cut our hair, shave, shave our beards and adhere to standards.”

 

He preached the importance of physical fitness. “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” he said. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”

 

He maintained, without presenting any evidence, that standards had been lowered across the force over the last decade to meet arbitrary racial and gender quotas.

 

Fixing these problems, Mr. Hegseth said, was the first step toward repairing a military that, since World War II, had lost the ability to win wars.

 

To some, Mr. Hegseth’s speech was poorly matched to his audience of senior officers who in most cases are responsible for complex military operations such as the maintenance of nuclear submarines, the management of America’s global alliances or the development of complex air-tasking orders, such as the one needed for the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program earlier this year.

 

The military officers assembled in the room listened silently. It is likely, though, that at least some of them were seething at his suggestion that their collective failure to enforce basic standards had caused, or even contributed to, the military’s failings in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

“I mean, first of all, that’s like an insane insult to his senior officers, who all made their bones fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Elliot Ackerman, who led Marines in the second battle of Falluja and served with a Marine special operations unit in Afghanistan. “Those guys have got a lot more dust on their boots than he does.”

 

Mr. Hegseth’s speech mirrored his leadership style over his first eight months in office, during which he has focused less on meeting with his foreign counterparts around the world and more on doing pull-ups and early morning runs with troops that are posted on the Pentagon’s social media feed.

 

“If the secretary of war can do regular, hard P.T., so can every member of our joint force,” he told the generals, using the military abbreviation for physical training.

 

His speech preceded a long, rambling address from President Trump, who bashed his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal and defeat in Afghanistan. “I think it was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country,” he said. “And now we’re back. We’re not going to have any of that crap happen, I can tell you. That was terrible, so terrible.”

 

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth were reckoning with the aftermath of one of the longest, most costly and disappointing stretches of war in American history.

 

Mr. Trump addressed the senior officers as a politician who had bested his hated rivals. Mr. Hegseth spoke largely from the perspective of a junior officer still burdened by the anger, pride and deep frustration of his service in Iraq nearly two decades earlier.

 

“He views the world from the point of view of a not terribly successful major in the National Guard,” said Eliot Cohen, a military historian who served in the State Department under President George W. Bush. “For him it’s push-ups, pull-ups and pugil sticks. It’s aggressiveness.”

 

Mr. Hegseth delivered his speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Northern Virginia clad in an American flag belt buckle and standing in front of a giant American flag. The backdrop mirrored the portrayal of Gen. George S. Patton in the 1970 movie bearing his name.

 

That film opened with excerpts from General Patton’s famous speeches to the Third Army before the Allied invasion of France during World War II. Those addresses were intended to motivate inexperienced troops who were preparing for brutal combat. In them, General Patton sought to convince every soldier from the truck driver to the cook that they were essential to victory.

 

“Every man is a vital link in the great chain,” General Patton famously preached, adding: “Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important in the vast scheme of this war.”

 

Mr. Hegseth, though, wasn’t speaking to green soldiers, but rather a roomful of senior officers with thousands of years of combined experience leading troops around the world. Much of that experience, he said, had been corrupted by “decades of decay, some of it obvious, some of it hidden,” inflicted on the military by “woke” political and military leaders.

 

Mr. Hegseth said one of his major tasks has been to separate those officers who were truly invested in the changes that he believed had weakened the force and those who were grudgingly following lawful orders.

 

In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” Mr. Hegseth maintained that women were not mentally suited to combat roles. “Women bring life into the world,” he wrote. “Their role in war is to make it a less deathly experience.”

 

In his speech to the generals, Mr. Hegseth struck a slightly different tone, arguing that the military had improperly loosened standards to accommodate women who may not be as able to carry a rucksack or lift a casualty on the battlefield.

 

“War does not care if you’re a man or a woman,” Mr. Hegseth said. “Neither does the enemy.”

 

But he insisted that he did not want to prevent women from serving in combat roles. Rather, Mr. Hegseth said, he wanted to hold them to the “highest male standard.”

 

“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” he added.

 

His goal seemed to be to turn back the clock to the simpler, more straightforward World War II era. He noted repeatedly that this was the last time the United States won “a major theater war.”

 

The nostalgia-soaked speech, though, did not acknowledge how much had changed in the past 75 years. In World War II, the entire country mobilized to fight the fascist Axis forces in a war that would change the course of history.

 

Today, the military Mr. Hegseth leads faces a world of complex and shifting security challenges that require the Pentagon to work through allies and partners. Often the enemies’ actions in cyberspace or the information domain are intended to weaken American resolve and credibility without tipping into all-out war.

 

Mr. Hegseth’s vision of military strength left little room for these subtleties. Nor did it mention the recent deployment of National Guard soldiers to places like Washington, D.C., where they have been tasked with “beautification” missions, such as raking leaves and picking up trash.

 

Mr. Hegseth seemed to divide his senior leaders into two categories: “the woke” and the war fighters. Most of the senior officers in the room, he said, fell into the latter category.

 

“You are hereby liberated to be an apolitical, hard-charging, no-nonsense, constitutional leader that you joined the military to be,” he told them.

 

Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Times.

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