WaPo defense beat reporters Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp and Alex Horton (“Military leaders absorb highly partisan presentation from Trump, Hegseth“):
Hundreds of the U.S. military’s top leaders absorbed highly partisan addresses from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, with each harshly criticizing their predecessors and touting their agendas in a summit that was extraordinary in nature but ultimately broke little new ground.
[…]
Trump, in meandering remarks that stretched about an hour and 10 minutes, joked that if those in attendance did not like what he had to say, they could leave the room — but “there goes your rank, there goes your future,” he added, drawing some uncomfortable laughter. Since returning to power, Trump and Hegseth have fired numerous generals and admirals, often without cause — and focusing on a disproportionate number of women.
The president defended his polarizing use of the armed forces to police American cities, decrying what he said was “the enemy within” while insisting he should be allowed to use military force domestically. He extolled his decision to rebrand the Defense Department as the Department of War, lamented his inability to end the conflict in Ukraine, and tacitly acknowledged the highly sensitive movements of U.S. submarines off the coast of Russia.
“I call it the ‘n-word,’” the president said of the submarines, appearing to allude to the vessels’ nuclear power. “There are two n-words, and you can’t use either of them.”
The assembled military brass sat through the presentations mostly silent, in keeping with the military’s nonpartisan tradition. Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, said that they “managed well a very difficult walk along a high wire” by listening respectfully to both partisan speeches without responding. Trump and Hegseth, he added, also deserve credit for showing that they understand why the military leaders were remaining quiet.
“The speeches raised a lot of questions that the military will have to grapple with in the months ahead,” Feaver said. “But they won’t have to do so on live TV, and so a very tricky moment in American civil-military relations did not produce the disaster that some feared.”
Their White House beat colleagues Emily Davies and Matt Viser (“Trump tells a roomful of silent generals to join a ‘war from within’“):
President Donald Trump delivered a meandering address to an unprecedented gathering of the country’s top military leaders, railing against his predecessor, celebrating tariffs and floating the idea of using American cities as a training ground for the military as he painted a picture of the U.S. under attack “from within.”
Trump in recent months has lambasted blue cities and states as hotbeds of crime, but the speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday morning marked the first time he publicly directed military leaders to be “a major part” of fighting a “war from within” in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
“We’ve brought back the fundamental principle that defending the homeland is the military’s first and most important priority. That’s what it is,” Trump said. “It is only in recent decades that politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia, while America is under invasion from within.”
The president spoke for more than an hour to a largely silent room at the military base about 30 miles south of Washington, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had summoned generals and admirals from across the globe. Trump, who draws energy off of instantaneous feedback, appeared to speak more slowly than usual and in a monotone, seemingly affected by a largely mum audience.
[…]
The military follows strict customs and courtesies, which include showing deference and respect to the commander in chief and refraining from showing approval or disapproval of political statements. On Tuesday, laughter occasionally followed a joke, but Trump’s attacks on former president Joe Biden were met with silence and his efforts to elicit a call-and-response in support of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, fell flat, according to pool reports.
“I was told that, ‘Sir, you won’t hear a murmur in the room,’” Trump continued. “I said we had to loosen these guys up a little bit.”
Over at NYT, defense reporters Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Shawn McCreesh (“Trump and Hegseth Recount Familiar Partisan Complaints to Top Military Leaders“) weigh in:
President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned more than 800 of the country’s top brass to a military base in Virginia on Tuesday to voice a familiar litany of culture war talking points and criticize a military that they complained had become distracted by political correctness.
The rare and highly anticipated call-up drew the country’s military commanders, who flew in from Asia, Europe and points between on short notice. The president delivered a rambling address that included familiar talking points and critiques and Mr. Trump’s revelation that he had told Mr. Hegseth to use American cities where he has deployed troops as “training grounds” for the military.
[…]
Mr. Trump praised his own tariff and border policies and insulted former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Discussing his efforts to send troops to American cities, he said: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Newly promulgated social media rules constrain me from commenting on these remarks. Suffice it to say, I’ve never seen anything like it.
And that I share Feaver’s assessment of the civil-military relations aspects of all of this. Our senior military leaders are rightly uncomfortable being subjected to attacks on their former commander-in-chief and former senior military leader. That they refrained from visible reaction was to their credit.
As to some of the rest, it remains to be seen what was spontaneous bluster and what foreshadowed substantive policy shifts. There are extreme interpretations that, if manifest, would require making professional choices more difficult than sitting on their hands.
