{"id":47879,"date":"2025-09-25T21:10:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T02:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=47879"},"modified":"2025-09-26T03:12:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T08:12:07","slug":"hegseths-abrupt-military-meeting-stokes-anxieties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=47879","title":{"rendered":"Hegseth\u2019s abrupt military meeting stokes anxieties"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will meet with top military leaders next week following a report that the rare gathering will include hundreds of generals and admirals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Secretary of War will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week<\/strong>,\u201d chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell\u2002<\/u><\/a>said in a statement to The Hill, offering no additional details. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Washington Post first reported<\/u><\/a> that Hegseth earlier this week ordered hundreds of the U.S. military\u2019s generals and admirals to gather on short notice and without a stated reason<\/strong>. The meeting is expected to take place on Tuesday at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., according to the Post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a dozen people familiar with the matter told the outlet that the directive was sent to virtually all of the military\u2019s top commanders worldwide \u2014 all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, their Navy equivalent and their top enlisted advisers \u2014 more than 800 generals or admirals<\/strong>. It\u2019s not clear how many had been ordered to attend the gathering in person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unexpected confab has created confusion and alarm<\/strong>, as there has not been a Defense secretary in recent history who has ordered such a large number of the military\u2019s top officers to gather like this, and it comes at a time when the Trump administration has taken an axe to the senior ranks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meetings of top military officials are not unusual; four-star combatant commanders and the heads of the armed services typically meet at least twice a year in Washington, D.C., a confab that often includes a working dinner with the sitting president. In 2020 and 2021, with restrictions on in-person meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, military leaders relied on secure communications to meet remotely<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is very rare, however, for such a large meeting of top officers to be in person in one location. The fast timing is also unusual<\/strong>. Such a gathering with senior leadership would typically take months to plan and prior notice would have to be given well in advance, as officers could be coming from the Middle East, Africa and Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Trump on Thursday downplayed the sudden meeting<\/strong> but claimed not to know what it would entail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy is that such a big deal?<\/strong>\u201d Trump said from the Oval Office. \u201cYou act like this is a bad thing, isn\u2019t it nice that people are coming from all over the world to meet?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s actually not unusual at all and I think it\u2019s odd that you guys have made it into such a big story,\u201dVice President Vance said, also dismissing questions about the gathering\u2019s purpose<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Greg Williams, the director of the Center for Defense Information at Project on Government Oversight, called the meeting \u201cunprecedented\u201d in its scale. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt begs the question of why [Hegseth] would do something on such short notice and require so many people to show up in person,\u201d Williams told The Hill. \u201cThe absence of public justification<\/strong> for something so unprecedented is in and of itself, a sort of concern.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He added that the military normally doesn\u2019t require such large, in-person meetings for a whole host of different reasons, including the disruption of ongoing operations, security and \u201cjust the sheer safety concerns<\/strong> of having that large a fraction of our military leadership all in one place,\u201d calling it \u201creally concerning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The upcoming meeting follows Hegseth\u2019s directive to reduce the number of general officers by 20 percent<\/strong> as the administration eyes changes to where troops are placed across the globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The order also comes after the Trump administration has fired numerous senior leaders this year.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will meet with top military leaders next week following a report that the rare gathering will include hundreds of generals and admirals. \u201cThe Secretary of War will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week,\u201d chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell\u2002said in a statement to The Hill, offering no additional details.  The Washington Post first reported that Hegseth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":47880,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153],"tags":[31240,1156,838],"class_list":["post-47879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-military","tag-hegseth","tag-military","tag-will"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47879"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47882,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47879\/revisions\/47882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}