Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Speaking to Reporters in Colorado Springs, CO

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Speaking to Reporters in Colorado Springs, CO

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But in case you couldn’t tell, and I’m sure you could, it wasn’t about the football game. You know, this Send Me Tour is about—the President talks about it a lot, and he’s dead right—about a spirit. A spirit we feel across the force in our formations.

At the Academy, we’ve spent a lot of attention on West Point, on Annapolis, and on Colorado Springs. Brand new leadership, new curriculum, merit-based approach. And I think you’re starting to see and feel that spirit.

Certainly the leadership there is as well. And then the same with the reenlistments all across the country. Highlighting the fact that it’s been a historic surge in young people that want to join the military, which, man, that’s edifying for me.

It means families across the country are looking around saying, hey, that’s the kind of department we’re willing to entrust our most precious asset, our sons and daughters, with. And then the retention rate is another one that doesn’t get enough attention. But from the Abraham Lincoln to all across the force, folks that are in are choosing to stay in, and we’re doing it based on a merit system where the best of the best are staying in, which is exactly how you perpetuate goodness inside your force.

So thanks a lot for coming. Appreciate having you and happy to take a few questions. Mr. Secretary, a little bit about the force posture over in CENTCOM right now.

Is the USS Roosevelt in transit to CENTCOM? Is it going to be replacing one of the two carriers that are there, or are there going to be three carriers in CENTCOM? It’s a fair question, but I’ll never answer it. I’d say maximizing the decision space for the commander-in-chief at any point is my job, while also recognizing the way we balance global demands as a force with global responsibilities. So the president’s going to have options, let’s put it that way, and I’ll leave it there.

Yeah, and do you feel like operations will be over by the end of the year? Well, I’m going to defer to the commander-in-chief who’s going to make those decisions, and you’ve heard what he said about that. But I would contrast what we’re doing here and the approach we’re taking with previous generations of wars that the president has pointed out that went on for not just years but decades with some nebulous end state and a mission that’s not clear. As we’ve stated from the beginning, Iran will never have a nuclear bomb, full stop.

That is a vital national interest of the United States of America. We’ve made that clear from Midnight Hammer. We made it clear through Epic Fury.

We’ve continued to state that today. Iran wants to play games with things like the Strait of Hormuz. They don’t control it.

We do. They have literally gotten nothing through. Our blockade has been ironclad, and we’re running almost at pre-war levels every single night through that.

You see that as far as the throughput. So we feel like we’re in a very strong position. Iran ought to make the right choice.

If they don’t, the president is going to have all the options he needs on the table. But he’s not going to let these things extend unnecessarily because he understands what the mission is, and we can get it done when called upon. So he still believes, and I take it you believe, that this conflict can have a military solution to it.

Well, it could be resolved in multiple ways. The president has given Iran every opportunity to do it at the table. But militarily, we’ve laid out time and time again how devastating our attacks have been.

And the more we step back and the dust clouds clear, Iran’s economy, its defense industrial base, its ability to reconstitute, it’s just not there. You add that alongside the blockade, and they run out of options, which means the longer we hold the blockade, we can hold it as long as we need to. Trust me, we can adapt that as necessary, which I know is bad news for Iran and limits their options.

So they will never have a nuclear weapon, and we’ll decide whatever has to happen to ensure that, we’ll do. Do you see no evidence that they are presently attempting to reconstitute their missile capability and their launchers? I mean, of course we monitor in real time, but think of it this way. Their Raytheons, their Boeings, their Lockheeds, their Northrop Grummans are what was destroyed in epic fury.

So they’re going to attempt to reconstitute. They’re a terror state. The economy is a terror state, so they’re going to always attempt to reconstitute.

But when you’ve been so destroyed and degraded the way that they have, it’s a very slow process, a very frustrated process. And we see that and we understand that. So they’re going to try, understandably so.

But our capabilities, I mean, it’s pretty tough for them to control the Strait of Hormuz when they don’t have a navy, they don’t have fast boats, and they’ve got no air force. And then we’ve done such incredible damage to their ability to see and sense the Strait of Hormuz. We control it, we dominate it, in both an asymmetric and a conventional sense.

I asked the president the other day about possibly building a base in South America, specifically maybe Venezuela, to ensure American dominance in the Western Hemisphere and also to ensure that things don’t go back to the way they were in Venezuela. Do you support that? Do you see that happening? Well, we’re definitely expanding our presence and our footprint in Central and South America with partners. And because of the bold move the president made in Venezuela, we have a whole new suite of options economically and militarily with partnerships.

And then what’s happened in Colombia with the election, we have long-standing mill-to-mill contacts there. In Ecuador, where they’ve invited us in to partner, in Honduras, in Guatemala, in Panama, almost the entirety of the hemisphere has changed. And part of my job is to institute the national security strategy and the national defense strategy, which makes very clear that we want more burden-sharing in Europe.

And as we do that, some of those capabilities are going to move elsewhere, either back home to the big, beautiful base that we’re going to build that we announced a couple of days ago, or to a different posture in the Western Hemisphere as we get after these designated terrorist organizations. We are at war with the drug cartels, with DTOs. The president’s been clear about that.

So we’re going to posture and base as necessary to ensure that we have our foot on the pedal and are taking the fight to those ISIS and al-Qaeda of our hemisphere. Can I ask one unrelated question? One more. Yeah.

I recently was asked to review a book by the New York Post. It’s called Valley of Death. How big tech is fueling the future of war.

It’s by a woman who’s a reporter, used to be with the Wall Street Journal, named Sharon Weinberger. I thought it was not always an easy to read book, but a good one. And it chronicles the slow marriage between the defense establishment and Silicon Valley.

And, of course, where the defense establishment has always had a relationship with private industry, going back a hundred years, she makes the point that this is the first time where so much of the hardware and software that’s vital to our kill chain and to our national security is actually owned in private hands by various tech bros and millionaires, basically. And I just wonder if you, with your vantage point, believe that Silicon Valley today has perhaps too much power or control over various points in the kill chain. Silicon Valley is one of our critical advantages.

Name another country that has something similar to what we have in Silicon Valley or in Austin or elsewhere. We would be foolish to miss our moment and not leverage these companies who have realized there’s threats around the globe and it makes a lot of sense to be an American company that invests in the American military and partners with America’s War Department in order to accelerate the step change moment we are on the battlefield. Between AI and autonomy, the autonomous warfare command that we’ve pushed, it’s a step change moment.

Either we integrate and integrate faster or you start to see parity in ways that we don’t want, that doesn’t currently exist and we won’t allow it to happen. So, of course, we’re protecting IP and department equities, but we are running fast to open the aperture so that even more new entrants can come in and partner with us. I mean, the future battlefield is going to be iterative.

It’s going to be innovative. It’s going to need to be fast. It’s going to need to be scalable, attritable, autonomous, robotics, AI, you name it.

Those are all the things we’re thinking about through autonomous warfare command as well as the future of warfare. So we welcome these companies recognizing that it’s an American moment where we need our best entrepreneurs, our best companies, and that we’re opening our department to them so we’re not fixated on just a few exquisite companies. It’s got to be more and we’ve got to leverage them.

A couple more real quick. Yes, about the Military Spouse Commission. Yes.

What are they going to be involved in? How are they going to be involved in this new base, this great American base? How are they going to be implemented? Are they going to be a part of that? Of course, because they’re looking at every aspect of how we do health care, child care, spouse employment, education, every aspect of what feeds into quality of life. And I hope you’ve seen recently we’ve increased troop pay yet again. We’ve got another troop pay proposal out there.

Combat pay almost doubled it. That hasn’t happened in a very long time. Combat zone pay, danger pay.

Quality of life issues are front and center for us. They just haven’t been for far too long. So when you look at a base like that, we’re going to look at what it looks like, try to replicate it, but then also do it across the rest of the force as well.

There are some pretty straightforward solutions that just haven’t been funded or changes that required secretary-level priority in order to make them happen. And that commission is going to bring those ideas to me so that we can action them very, very quickly. One more question.

Do you have a message for Iran and what they need to do in order for the U.S. to lift our naval blockade straight forward? Well, the message is very simple. Iran will never, ever, ever have a nuclear weapon. President Trump is hell-bent and determined to ensure that they do not.

They will not. If they want to blink and think that he doesn’t mean it, it would be to their detriment. So now is the moment where they can decide to give it up the way that they should without any leverage that they have, or it may have to happen the hard way.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you all very much.

Good to see you guys.