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Everyone loves meetings! Who isn’t a fan of those congenial time wasters common in the government, where an entire organization piles into a poorly ventilated auditorium to hear the leadership explain things that could have just been an email?
Okay, no one loves them, but when I worked for the Department of Defense, they weren’t that onerous a requirement, especially because I was merely an academic who could play Scrabble on my phone while some visiting admiral talked about … well, honestly, I don’t remember what they talked about. (We had a lot of those meetings.) I was not, however, a senior officer in charge of a major command, with responsibility for thousands of people and millions of dollars of weaponry. Those folks are busy, which is why the DOD has very advanced—and very expensive—teleconferencing equipment designed to obviate the need to move people around the world for a chat.
But Secretary of Defense/War/Lethality Pete Hegseth isn’t going to use that technology. Instead, he recently decided that some 800 generals and admirals needed to come, in person, from every corner of the planet to a Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, reportedly to listen to their boss, a former TV host, lecture them on the “warrior ethos”—and, for some reason, personal grooming. The Tuesday meeting will feature not only Hegseth but also a last-minute addition: the commander in chief himself.
Hegseth has had a lot of bad ideas, but this one is disruptive and even somewhat dangerous. All of these men and women have real jobs they should be doing. Even if Hegseth is calling this meeting to discuss serious issues of national defense—and so far, the Pentagon has given no such indications—few things are important enough to justify the security risk of putting the entire top U.S. military command, the secretary of defense, and the president all in the same room.
It is possible, of course, that Hegseth is convening this jamboree because something genuinely terrible is afoot. Perhaps he wants all of America’s top officers in the same room when he tells them, for example, that the United States is on the brink of going to war, or that the Pentagon has been deeply compromised by spies and all of our military secrets are now in Moscow or Beijing. But if America is heading into a crisis, then Hegseth’s call for a meeting is even more irresponsible, because in a time of danger all these people should be at their posts, not in an auditorium in Virginia.
More likely, however, Hegseth is ordering up a “loyalty check,” which is what the military calls it when the bosses schedule a surprise meeting just to make everyone show up. As the least qualified defense secretary in modern history, he must know that he has a credibility problem with many senior national-security leaders, and he is clearly angry about the leaks—often about him—dribbling out of the Pentagon on an almost-daily basis. The secretary may see this as a chance to remind America’s military who’s in charge.
As of now, that seems to be the goal. “It’s about getting the horses into the stable and whipping them into shape,” a defense official told CNN, and suggesting that it’s an opportunity made for television because “the guys with the stars on their shoulders make for a better audience from an optics standpoint. This is a showcase for Hegseth to tell them: get on board, or potentially have your career shortened.” A senior Trump administration official told The New York Times that the meeting is to “get our fighters excited” about new plans at DOD.
I’ve met a lot of admirals and generals in my time, and I’m not sure that a dressing-down from Pete Hegseth is going to be all that effective in either exciting them or scaring them.
So far, no one really knows why this meeting is taking place. Hegseth and his people have been tight-lipped about it, which is odd because they apparently intend to record and broadcast it anyway. The lack of information has created fertile ground for speculation; many of Donald Trump’s critics are wondering if Trump and Hegseth are going to demand a declaration of loyalty to the president that would be similar, as retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges suggested on X, to the way German officers in the 1930s were forced to swear allegiance to Hitler. (Hegseth responded to Hodges with the sort of dude-bro laziness that characterizes the social-media behavior of top Trump-administration officials: “Cool story, General.”) I think this sort of dramatic moment is unlikely, if only because even the dimmest Pentagon functionary would have warned Hegseth that trying to put hundreds of generals and admirals on the spot could go very badly.
What if something more substantive is in the works? Americans—and Congress—should be especially alert for anything that goes beyond a “Come on in for the big win” speech from either Hegseth or Trump. One possibility is that Hegseth is going to engage in some personnel-related shock and awe, and fire people in front of their colleagues. The officers, as The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said on Washington Week last week, “don’t know if they’re coming to a pep rally or the Red Wedding.” Hegseth is on the record saying that the military is too top-heavy with senior officers, but a public dismissal of U.S.-military leaders would be both terrible management and a gift to our enemies. (Imagine Vladimir Putin’s smirk as he tells the Russian general staff: “At least you don’t work in the Pentagon.”) It is nonetheless conceivable that some officers will arrive in Quantico as top commanders and leave as retirees.
Another possibility is that Hegseth has decided that his schemes for reorganizing the U.S. military just aren’t being taken seriously enough. Hegseth has been getting resistance to his push to reshape several military commands, so he may be trying to announce new structures as a fait accompli and then order the officers—who would have to draw up the actual plans—to make them happen. Hegseth surely knows that they can still slow-roll his ideas into oblivion, and he may have called this meeting because he somehow thinks he has enough force of personality to stare down some 800 men and women who were officers when he was still in high school.
Finally, the Trump administration might really be about to put the nation on a war footing, and so Hegseth wants everyone where he can talk to them and then meet one-on-one if necessary. This, too, is unlikely; such a discussion would have to include classified information, which means that the meeting could not be shown on television later.
In the end, I suspect that Hegseth is trying to bolster his stature by flexing his bureaucratic muscles. He’s disrupting the work and daily life of hundreds of people to emphasize that he has the power to do so. Like Trump himself, Hegseth seems to feel the need to do things that others think are unwise as a way of demonstrating toughness and independence. Both men remind me of Miles, the creepy child in the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw. When Miles misbehaves, his governess asks him why he would do such a thing. “Why, it was to show you I could!” he says. “And I can again.”
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Today’s News
- During today’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, President Donald Trump unveiled a Gaza peace plan that Netanyahu agreed to. The proposal calls for a halt to fighting and the release of hostages within 72 hours, but Hamas has not yet accepted the terms.
- At least four people were killed and eight injured after a man drove into a church, shot at parishioners, and set fire to the building in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, yesterday. The suspect was killed at the scene, police said, and investigators are still working to determine a motive.
- Oregon and the city of Portland filed a lawsuit yesterday against the Trump administration to block the deployment of Oregon National Guard troops. On Saturday, Trump said that he was ordering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to federalize 200 Guardsmen for 60 days to protect ICE and other federal personnel in the city.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic
The Doomed Dream of an AI Matchmaker
By Faith Hill
Whitney Wolfe Herd has a vision for modern romance. More than a decade after founding Bumble, in 2014, she’s back at the dating-app company—and this time, she wants to get things right. For too long, she argues, people have been swiping in the dark: evaluating other multifaceted beings on the basis of a few pictures and superficial bits of description, being evaluated in turn, feeling judged and empty. Now, she says, she’s seeking a new way to inject some warmth and humanity into the process—using, as she recently told The Wall Street Journal, “the world’s smartest and most emotionally intelligent matchmaker.” She’s talking about AI.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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