Pat Ryan is tied to Pete Hegseth’s Virginia address to hundreds of junior officers and enlisted service members, where he said the Pentagon was no longer the “woke” or “weak” department. Hegseth delivered the speech on Wednesday in a cavernous auditorium on a military base and called it a first annual “State of the Force” report.
He told the audience, “We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department.” Hegseth also said, “Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos. No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.” He said he had already fired about ten per cent of the military’s generals and planned to dismiss ten per cent more.
Virginia State of the Force
Hegseth’s staff handed out a 144-page field manual before the address. It consisted of four Hegseth speeches and a foreword from Donald Trump, who wrote, “As your Commander-in-Chief, I will not ask you to fight dumb Wars.”
That setting gave the speech an institutional edge: Hegseth was not speaking off the cuff to a rally crowd but to service members in uniform, from a base in Virginia, under a new annual label. The manual turned the message into a package for troops, not a one-time appearance.
Pentagon and Iraq same day
On the same day, the Pentagon announced that it had closed the last major U.S. military base in Iraq, ending a twenty-three-year American presence that began with George W. Bush’s invasion in 2003 and cost $1.7 trillion. Hegseth did not mention China, Russia, Europe, or Africa in the speech.
He instead accused the “fake news” of “treason” for accurately reporting the challenges imposed on U.S. forces by an actual war in the Middle East. He said the war was over and a roaring success, calling it “that every red-blooded American is proud of.”
The contradiction is hard to miss. Hegseth framed the force around internal enemies and culture cleanup while the Pentagon was closing a major Iraq base and the Middle East war he cited was still pulling money and attention through the Defense Department. The most immediate question is how far his personnel purge goes now that he says about ten per cent of generals are already gone and ten per cent more are next.
