In his three weeks on the job, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has removed portraits of his predecessors from the Pentagon, banned Black History Month celebrations, restricted access to learning materials in military schools that touch on views he doesn’t like and attacked the renaming of bases that had honored Confederate generals.
On his first trip abroad in the role, he said in Brussels on Wednesday that it was unrealistic for Ukraine to regain all the territory seized by Russia. And he signaled to Europeans that they should look to themselves rather than the United States to ensure their security.
All of the new cabinet secretaries have embraced their role as promoters of President Trump’s slashing brand of politics. Few, though, have done so with such fervor as Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and Fox News host who shares the president’s view that allies have taken advantage of U.S. largess for too long but who brings a special intensity to perceived enemies at home.
During his first meeting with Pentagon employees at a town hall event on Friday, Mr. Hegseth spent much of his opening remarks defending his efforts to dismantle diversity and inclusion policies. He repeated his talking points about “lethality” and bringing “warfighting” back to the military. He briefly spoke about “Communist China,” but said nothing about Iran, North Korea or Russia.
Deterrence, he said, “starts with our own southern border.”
“It starts with the defense of our homeland,” he continued.
It was a view he reiterated on Tuesday, after meeting with U.S. troops and commanders in Stuttgart, Germany. Asked at a news conference if China was the biggest threat to the United States, he replied, “Right now, the biggest threat was securing our own border, which we are addressing rapidly.”
To help fulfill Mr. Trump’s goal of curtailing undocumented immigrants, the Pentagon has rushed 1,600 Marines and Army soldiers to the country’s border with Mexico. Those forces joined 2,500 troops who were already there.
Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly warned of an “invasion” and has put thousands of additional troops on alert to deploy, including the elite 82nd Airborne Division. But the deployments come even as the state of the border is fairly calm, with crossings having fallen sharply in recent months after the Biden administration took steps to limit migration.
The new defense secretary’s inward turn is hardly surprising, given his earlier statements on inclusion and the mistakes he believes the military brass made during the global wars against terrorism.
“He does want to orient toward the U.S. and the focus on the border and immigration and the military’s involvement in that,” said Risa Brooks, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University.
But, she added, “it leaves a lot of questions as to what the country’s orientation is going to be toward its external adversaries.”
Twice during the question-and-answer session on Friday, Pentagon employees asked about Russia and China.
Mr. Hegseth made no mention of Russia in his answers. He spoke about “the war that was unleashed in Ukraine,” but did not name the American adversary that had invaded the country.
Instead, Mr. Hegseth spoke of the need to maintain “standards” in the military. “It starts with the basic stuff, right?” Mr. Hegseth said. “It’s grooming standards and training standards, fitness standards, all of that matters.”
And speaking to a room filled with African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and white Americans, both men and women, Mr. Hegseth offered a full-throated attack on the military’s decades-long efforts to diversify.
“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” he said.
Mr. Hegseth acknowledged at the town hall that the weight of the job was sinking in.
He spoke of signing orders to deploy thousands of troops around the globe. He spoke of calling the families of two soldiers who died in a vehicle rollover at Fort Stewart, Ga., and the families of the three crew members aboard the Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided with a jetliner in skies over Washington last month.
“The costs and the consequences are very real,” he said.
Although Mr. Hegseth is in Europe this week, he is skipping the Munich Security Conference — usually an important port of call for new defense secretaries — but met with American troops in Germany and Poland. He worked out with Army Green Berets on Tuesday, posting on social media photos of himself lifting weights and running with troops from the 10th Special Forces Group.
“I would much rather talk to troops than go to cocktail parties,” he said at the town hall last week. (At his Senate confirmation hearing last month, he said that he had done five sets of 47 push-ups that morning — possibly in homage to Mr. Trump, the 47th president.)
“The press in Washington might think I’m young,” Mr. Hegseth, 44, said in Stuttgart, when asked about his fitness routine. “But in military terms I’m old.”
On Wednesday, he attended the first monthly meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group of the Trump administration. The group was created in April 2022 and led by Lloyd J. Austin III, but Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have given up leadership of the group to Britain.
He will attend a NATO defense ministers meeting on Thursday.
“It’s a promising sign that he is engaging in the NATO conversation, and engaging with his foreign counterparts,” Katherine Kuzminski, the director of the Military, Veterans and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security, said in an interview.
But, she added that it was unclear where the defense secretary stood on issues that involve NATO.
And he has not gone — yet — on a threatened purge of generals, although he did warn during his town hall that a reckoning on Afghanistan was coming.
“A lot of people have been heartened that Secretary Hegseth has so far maintained the military leadership, because there were fears that he might fire some of them,” Ms. Brooks said.
Mr. Hegseth has not appeared before the domestic news media at the Pentagon — something his predecessor, Mr. Austin, also balked at — but he has made multiple appearances on Fox News nighttime programming.
In fact, when it comes to the news media, Mr. Hegseth has been more forceful than his boss.
Mr. Hegseth has told some news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC and CNN, that they would have to give up their dedicated office space at the Pentagon. In a new rotation, they will be replaced by other outlets, including the right-wing sites Breitbart News and One America News.
On his first day on the job, Mr. Hegseth pointedly referred to Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, using the old names for two military installations that had been named after Confederate generals. Those installations were renamed in 2023 as part of a wider effort that began during Mr. Trump’s first administration to eliminate military honors bestowed on men who rebelled against the Union during the Civil War.
The bases cannot formally go back to the Confederate generals’ names unless Congress changes the law again. So Army officials, directed by Mr. Hegseth, have been looking for troops with the same surnames, Army officials said. They came up with an enlisted Army soldier named Roland L. Bragg, who was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for combat during World War II.
On Monday night, Mr. Hegseth posted a video of himself signing a new order from his plane: “There it is. Pursuant to the authority of secretary of defense, Title 10 United States Code Section 113, I direct the Army to change the name of Fort Liberty, N.C., to Fort Bragg, N.C.,” he said in the video. “That’s right. Bragg is back.”
Defense officials say it would have been easy to switch the base’s name back to Fort Bragg, since it had been renamed Fort Liberty. The other bases were renamed to honor people, including a Black sergeant who battled German soldiers during World War I, the Army’s first Hispanic four-star general and a woman who served as an Army surgeon during the Civil War.
Army officials have estimated that it cost about $39 million to rename the bases.
Asked at the town hall whether the Pentagon could face the same drastic cuts that Elon Musk has sought for the main federal aid agency and other departments, Mr. Hegseth vowed that whatever trims were made would be done “carefully.” The process will not be hasty, he said, “because we’re in the business of national security.”
And yet soon after, Mr. Hegseth reposted a message on X from Mr. Musk that endorsed Mr. Trump’s assertion in an interview with Fox News that “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” would be uncovered at the Pentagon.
Even with the Pentagon’s $850 billion annual budget, losing “hundreds of billions” would gut the largest agency in the government.
