His remarks in full:
Some thoughts on it and related things:
Right off the bat, all hands meetings are dumb, just send an email instead of tormenting a captive audience. That's the sort of attention whoring I expect from ex-journalists and career bureaucrats.
His fixation on things that are irrelevant to modern warfare like grooming and waistlines was painful to watch. There were plenty of hairy soldiers and generals in the US Civil War. Very few were obese because they spent a few years walking everywhere with around 40 pounds of gear. Everything else was transported by mules, and it was a mistake to get rid of them later.
Army Special Forces and suchlike were meant to tip the scales of proxy wars in America's favor. That goal has yet to be achieved for various naive reasons. The US military held the line in South Korea before Special Forces was at its present size (it was founded during the Korean War in 1952).
It's a bad idea to publicly criticize the organization you're in charge of, and not just for strategic or propaganda reasons. Announcing to the world that our military sucks will not bring about positive change. In any case, the real problem is smart troops get out of the military as quickly as possible once they get fed up with all the reindeer games.
From a more practical perspective, the USMC has never missed its recruiting goal, probably because they have a macho appeal that isn't found in the other branches. That's fine and dandy, but it's the Army that has always struggled to recruit and retain enough people. There's a widespread belief that soldiers must be trim athletes. But physical fitness stopped being an issue for all militaries during WW1 when machine guns and long-range artillery became the norm.
Hegseth is tired of seeing fat soldiers and generals? I'm tired of seeing flag-draped coffins coming back from wars we didn't need to fight in the first place. If I had a magic wand, we'd never go to war unless at least 10% of our troops, generals, admirals, etc. can speak the language of the enemy military. Not true fluency, but enough to get by, kind of like what the French Foreign Legion requires.
We tend to romanticize the infantry even though more than 80% of the casualties in modern warfare are from things like landmines, artillery, mortars, etc. Most soldiers kill and get killed by people they never even see.
I have other material here and elsewhere on this topic. Here is my suggested reading list:
The Anatomy of Courage
The Science of Victory by Suvorov
Never fight if you don't have to.
Never fight alone.
Never fight for long.
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