Pete Hegseth put on his military fatigues for a new photo op a week after yelling at top brass about grooming and DEI.
Photos published by Hegseth and the Defense Department on Tuesday showed the self-anointed “Secretary of War” joining service members at the Florida-based U.S. Special Operations Command.
“A day in the office w/ America’s finest,” Hegseth wrote on X.
“America has the STRONGEST warfighters in the world,” the Defense Department wrote in a separate post. “Always ready. Always prepared.”
The series of images showed Hegseth wielding a rifle aboard a helicopter and getting down on the ground with the troops.
Hegseth served as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard, with active-duty deployments to Guantánamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He received two Bronze Star medals for meritorious service—not valor, as a now-deleted White House video tried to claim.
Just last month, Hegseth staged a similar cosplay stunt as he met with sailors and Marines off the coast of Puerto Rico to deliver a chest-thumping message to the crew aboard USS Iwo Jima.
“You’re trained, you’re prepared, you’re ready, and you’re lethal. And the American people are counting on you to ensure the American homeland is kept safe,” he tells service members.
The Defense Secretary’s penchant for fiery pep talks appeared to reach a fever pitch last week, when he abruptly summoned top military brass from across the globe to an unprecedented meeting at Quantico.
Hegseth raised alarm when he convened top military officials without immediately giving a reason, then stoked quiet outrage when it was revealed that he planned to give them a bizarre pep talk in front of the cameras.
The Pentagon chief ended up delivering a 45-minute diatribe against fat generals, men with beards, and “dudes in dresses,” which current and former officials described to Politico as a “waste of time” that was “more like a press conference than [a] briefing.”
“It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit,” a former senior defense official told the outlet.
