Revitalizing America’s Defense Industrial Base Takes Center Stage In Hegseth’s Address To Shipbuilders
'We've been clear: the era of rewarding delays and cost overruns is over,' said War Secretary Pete Hegseth.'We've been clear: the era of rewarding delays and cost overruns is over,' said War Secretary Pete Hegseth.Troops who refused COVID shot to receive retroactive honor to 'right the wrongs of the past': Hegseth
President Trump's secretary of war is making it a point to set the record straight for those servicemen and -women who adhered to their convictions and refused the Biden COVID shots.
In a memorandum dated December 6, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered Pentagon leadership to identify service members wrongfully discharged because of their refusal to take the jab and give them their due.
Sean Parnell said that nearly 8,700 service members were 'involuntarily separated' from the military because of their refusal to take the jab.
Specifically, many service members were given a general discharge rather than a fully honorable discharge.
"It is unconscionable that thousands of former Service members who held true to their personal and religious convictions were not just separated, but separated with General (Under Honorable Conditions), rather than Honorable, discharge characterizations," Hegseth wrote.
RELATED: Activist judges overruled: Trump judges greenlight Hegseth’s ban on military 'dudes in dresses'
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that nearly 8,700 service members were "involuntarily separated" from the military because of their refusal to take the jab.
Of those, Parnell continued, "more than 3,000 received less than honorable discharge characterizations."
"The department is committed to ensuring that everyone who should have received a fully honorable discharge receives one and continues to right wrongs and restore confidence in and honor to our fighting force,” Parnell said.
In his first week back in office, Trump signed an executive order to reinstate service members who left or were removed from duty on account of the "unfair, overbroad, and unnecessary" COVID vaccine mandates. Hegseth then began implementing that directive in February.
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Hegseth Orders Review Of Discharge Characterizations For Troops Booted Over Biden’s Covid Shot Mandate
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum ordering a reevaluation of discharge characterizations for service members removed from service for foregoing the Biden-era Covid shot mandate, the Pentagon revealed Tuesday. Signed on Dec. 6, the new directive instructs the War Department to undertake a “proactive review of personnel records, to identify individuals who were […]Congress strips merit from the military and shackles the president in one bill
The Trump administration recently released an extremely promising National Security Strategy — but the same cannot be said about the proposed National Defense Authorization Act for the 2026 fiscal year.
The House and Senate’s compromise NDAA appears to be in tension with the goals of the administration’s strategy. While the National Security Strategy prioritizes a hemispheric defense of the American homeland, the NDAA locks decision-makers into maintaining unnecessary overseas troop levels. Despite President Trump’s stated strategic aims, Congress seems intent on safeguarding the national security priorities and infrastructure of previous eras.
The NDAA represents the ‘deep state,’ a combination of entrenched interests, committees, lobbies, and bureaucracies that value continuity over strategy and reform.
Restricting the drawdown of troops stationed overseas, increasingly murky foreign entrenchment through legally binding efforts to sell arms, and dubious clauses requiring congressional approval at every turn, all serve to bind the commander in chief’s hands. All of this reeks of a shadowy order desperately trying to maintain the status quo at the expense of the will of the people who elected Donald Trump in 2024.
This cannot stand.
Section 1249 of the NDAA states that U.S. forces in Europe cannot fall below 76,000 for more than 45 days without presidential certifications to Congress. This is supposed to ensure that troop reductions present no threat to NATO partners or U.S. national security. (Absurdly, the bill requires the U.S. to consult with every NATO ally and even “relevant non-NATO partners.”) But stripping the president of essential discretion through ludicrous legislative roadblocks categorically subverts his authority under the Constitution.
Section 1255 states that troop levels cannot dip below 28,500 in the Korean Peninsula, nor can wartime operational control be transferred without an identical trial by fire of congressional approvals and national-security certifications.
Shifting our military focus to our own backyard was a stated goal of the National Security Strategy. If this vision is to be implemented, Congress cannot serve as a bureaucratic middleman that hinders deployment flexibility through pedantic checklists.
Americans need to understand that the NDAA would obstruct the execution of President Trump’s agenda. As written, it functions as a deliberate statutory barrier to presidential decision-making. This denotes a redistribution of war powers from the elected executive to a sprawling and unaccountable institutional structure.
The NDAA represents what Americans call the “deep state,” a combination of entrenched interests, committees, lobbies, and bureaucracies that value continuity over strategy and reform.
This continuity becomes clear when you look at what the House and Senate didn’t include in the compromise NDAA. The Senate’s original bill contained a provision barring the use of DEI in service-academy admissions — a measure that would have required merit-only standards and prevented racial profiling. Congress stripped that section out. The final bill includes a few weak gestures toward limiting DEI, but none of them meet President Trump’s goal of a military that rejects race and sex as factors altogether.
RELATED: Mexico has cartel armies. Blue America has cartel politics.
As written, the NDAA gives a future Democratic president the opportunity to reintroduce woke indoctrination in the military with the stroke of a pen. And laws favoring DEI at our nation’s most vital institutions could resurface on a whim, using typical “diversity is our strength” platitudes.
Despite its name, the NDAA functions less like a defense bill and more like the legal backbone of America’s global posture. Whatever promises the National Security Strategy makes, they cannot be realized so long as the current NDAA pulls in the opposite direction. Strategy should shape institutions — not the other way around.
In Washington jargon, the NDAA is treated as “must-pass” legislation. That label has no legal or constitutional basis. And even if it must pass, no one claims it must be signed.
The National Security Strategy reflects the will of voters; the NDAA reflects bureaucratic inertia. That is why the Trump administration cannot, in good conscience, approve this bill. Our escape from stagnation, mediocrity, and endless foreign entanglements depends on rejecting it — and time is running out.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.
Activist judges overruled: Trump judges greenlight Hegseth’s ban on military 'dudes in dresses'
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes — a foreign-born, Biden-appointed, lesbian judge who previously worked as a lawyer to fight the first Trump administration's immigration policy — decided in March to indefinitely block the enforcement of the second Trump administration's ban on transvestites in the military, suggesting it likely violated their constitutional rights.
Reyes, formerly of the Feminist Majority Foundation, suggested in her March 18 ruling that the "Military Ban is soaked in animus" and that it was her responsibility as a judge to keep the executive branch at heel, despite acknowledging the "pernicious" nature of judicial overreach.
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed the administration a big win: a 2-1 decision staying Reyes' order and greenlighting enforcement of the ban.
'We're done with that s**t.'
Citing the Supreme Court's June 6-3 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld Tennessee's ban on sex-rejecting genital mutilations and sterilizing puberty blockers for minors, U.S. Circuit Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao — both appointed by President Donald Trump — ruled that War Secretary Pete Hegseth's ban on trans-identifying military members likely did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause or trigger any form of heightened scrutiny.
"In Skrmetti, the Supreme Court held that a law prohibiting the use of hormones to treat gender dysphoria in minors 'classifies on the basis of medical use' and thus does not discriminate based on either sex or transgender status," Katsas wrote for the majority. "The same reasoning would seem to cover the Hegseth Policy, which classifies based on the medical condition of gender dysphoria."
Even if the policy contained a classification triggering some form of heightened scrutiny, Katsas emphasized that "decades of precedent establish that the judiciary must tread carefully when asked to second-guess considered military judgments of the political branches."
RELATED: 'Not medicine — it's malpractice': Trump HHS buries child sex-change regime with damning report
Katsas noted further that the policy was "likely constitutional because it reflects a considered judgment of military leaders and furthers legitimate military interests," such as cost issues, unit cohesion, and military readiness.
Trump noted in his Jan. 27 executive order titled "Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness":
Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false "gender identity" divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.
The Pentagon subsequently released guidance stating that "military service by Service members and applicants for military service who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria is incompatible with military service," and took steps to begin giving those with gender dysphoria the boot.
Katsas suggested that Reyes' claim that the Pentagon's policy did not advance legitimate interests was more or less baseless — that she:
- "gave no sound reason for overriding the Secretary's considered judgment";
- premised her claim that "medical studies now overwhelmingly conclude that gender dysphoria is highly treatable" on a "declaration from one doctor who simply stated, in one sentence and without citations, that 'gender dysphoria is highly treatable'"; and
- "downplayed evidence of greater mental-health issues faced by transgender individuals."
The court also rejected Reyes' suggestion that the policy is rooted in animus against transvestites, noting that she "looked beyond the Hegseth Policy itself to derive animus from various statements made by the President or other officials" — an approach the Supreme Court has previously rejected.
The dissenting judge on the panel, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, lashed out at her colleagues, claiming in a 27-page dissent — which reads like a work of LGBT activist literature — that the majority's decision "makes it all but inevitable that thousands of qualified servicemembers will lose careers they have built over decades, drawn up short by a policy that would repay their commitment and service to our nation with detriment and derision."
"The majority grants this stay in the face of all evidence to the contrary," continued U.S. Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard. "We should not accord deference to the military when the Department itself carelessly relied on no more than blatant animus."
According to Pillard, the Pentagon's decision to oust gender-dysphoric individuals from the military was "based on nothing more than negative attitudes about transgender identity."
She also clutched pearls about various comments from elements of the Trump administration, including War Secretary Pete Hegseth's May 6 remarks stating, "No more dudes in dresses; we're done with that s**t."
"Because the Hegseth Policy is openly fueled by animus towards transgender people and defendants have not shown that it is based on military considerations, it fails even the most deferential form of equal protection review," wrote Pillard.
Following the appellate court's ruling, Hegseth shared a cartoon to social media depicting him kicking a bearded man in a dress out of the Department of War. The transvestite depicted in the cartoon is holding a box containing a book titled "DEI Military" and an LGBT flag.
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Boy Scouts Have Themselves To Blame For Losing The Pentagon’s Favor
After decades of tossing Christianity and masculinity aside, Pete Hegseth is justified in revoking the Scouts' special treatment.Hegseth: ‘The War Department Will Not Be Distracted By Regime Change’
Hegseth outlined four top objectives for the National Defense Strategy, saying the 'so-called bipartisan consensus...is really just a euphemism for disastrous foreign policy.'Turns out that Hegseth’s ‘kill them all’ line was another media invention
Under his authority as commander in chief, the president can blow up pretty much anybody on Earth whom he deems a national security threat. He does not need permission from Congress, the media, or a panel of self-appointed commentators. The missile strikes on drug-running vessels operated by a designated terrorist group are lawful, routine, and predictable. What made the episode explosive was that it enraged exactly the faction that always reacts this way: the political left.
Impeachment is the only real consequence available to the administration’s critics, and after two failed efforts, that prospect does not keep President Trump awake at night. Republican control of the House makes even a symbolic attempt unlikely.
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict ‘experts’ who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with.
So the disloyal opposition defaults to its remaining weapon: information warfare. Media outlets, activist networks, and hostile bureaucrats have been carpet-bombing the information space with false claims designed to sow dissension among the ranks and mislead the public.
The country needs a president who can act decisively in defense of national security, without media gatekeepers, rogue judges, or partisan lawmakers running armchair military campaigns from the sidelines. The “Seditious Six” tried to undermine the president’s authority and cast doubt on lawful orders. The Washington Post attempted to turn that fiction into fact by quoting anonymous sources with unverifiable claims.
The central allegation is that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued an order to “kill everybody” on the vessel. The Post framed it this way: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”
The headline amplified the accusation: “Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.”
A “spoken directive” means no record. The quote is a paraphrase. Nothing indicates that the source actually heard the Hegseth say those words. This is an anonymous, secondhand characterization of an alleged statement — precisely the sort of raw material the Post loves to inflate into scandal.
Even if the words had been spoken, the context would determine legality. If a commander asks, “How big a bomb do we drop on the enemy location?” and the answer is, “Use one big enough to kill everybody,” that exchange would not be criminal. It is a description of the force required to neutralize a hostile asset.
If these anonymous sources truly believed the secretary issued an illegal order, they were obligated to report it through the chain of command. Their silence speaks louder than any paraphrase. The most plausible explanation is that someone misunderstood — or deliberately distorted — an aggressive statement by Hegseth and nothing more.
The United States targets terrorists. The implication behind the Post’s story is that survivors remained after the first strike and that either the secretary or JSOC ordered a second engagement to kill them. No evidence supports that claim. No one outside the direct participants knows what the surveillance picture showed or what tactical conditions existed immediately after the first blast.
RELATED: White House names names in new ‘media bias tracker’ in wake of ‘seditious’ Democrat video
President Trump stated publicly that Hegseth told him no order was given to kill survivors. The fact that U.S. forces recovered two survivors from the submersible drug vessel undercuts the Post’s narrative even more. Pete Hegseth is far more credible than Alex Horton and the newsroom that elevated this rumor.
— (@)
It is time to put a moratorium on the online laws-of-armed-conflict “experts” who materialize whenever a strike hits a target they sympathize with. They insist that the presence of wounded combatants instantly transforms a hostile platform into a protected site and that destroying the vessel itself becomes a war crime. Even the New York Times — no friend of the administration — punctured that claim:
According to five U.S. officials … Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile failed to accomplish all of those things … and his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.
The mobs demanding Hegseth’s scalp will be disappointed. The voters who supported this administration expected firm action against terrorist cartels and open-ocean drug networks. Another hostile vessel was reduced to an oil slick, and most Americans see that as a success.
Exclusive: Pete Hegseth to bring Christmas back to the Pentagon
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is launching his latest endeavor to uproot woke culture in the federal government by bringing Christmas to the Department of War, and Blaze News has exclusively learned about some recent changes at the Pentagon that are sure to bring everyone into the holiday spirit.
For instance, Hegseth will be holding the first ever Pentagon Tree Lighting Ceremony on Wednesday afternoon as well as revamping the old Christmas tree on the grounds.
Bald eagles were seen flying overhead.
This ceremony serves as a major course-correction from previous Pentagon leadership, contrasting starkly with President Joe Biden's Department of Defense.
Under Hegseth's leadership, this is the first time the Pentagon has decorated for Christmas at this scale, according to a DOW official.
To commemorate this new era at the Pentagon, Hegseth also signed off on removing the old Amelanchier tree that was planted on the grounds around 2008. The old tree had been declining for some time and was slated to be removed within the next year.
The tree was replaced by a 14-foot Nellie Stevens Holly from the Green Works Nursery in Chantilly, Virginia. Bald eagles were seen flying overhead while the new tree was being planted, one DOW official told Blaze News.
All Pentagon staff and their families were extended an invitation to the lighting ceremony, according to a DOW official.
"We are pro-family and pro-Christmas at the department," the official told Blaze News.
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