Could have been an email.

Pete Hegseth’s speech to top generals was supposed to serve as a rallying cry for military exceptionalism — but it didn’t land that way with many of the people it was targeting.

Numerous defense officials — who watched senior brass scramble to Washington and then sit through a partisan speech from President Donald Trump and a return to old-school military standards by Hegseth — were left wondering why the event had occurred at all.

“More like a press conference than briefing the generals,” said one defense official, who, like others, was granted anonymity due to fears of retribution. “Could have been an email.”

Defense officials, in the Pentagon and at bases around the world, spent much of Tuesday trying to make sense of the last-minute gathering at the Quantico base in Virginia. Hegseth called out “fat generals,” and, separately, pushed fitness standards that could limit women in combat roles, while Trump offered his justification for sending the military into American cities.

I bet they didn’t really “try to make sense” of it or wonder why it happened at all. It’s obvious why it happened: fun for Hegseth. So it cost hundreds of millions of dollars, so what, it was the best ego trip ever. Slash the National Weather Service, shut down USAID altogether, and squander a big chunk of the budget on a Hegseth-Trump photo opp.

Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine suggested Russian and Chinese officials would worry that hundreds of American generals and admirals had gathered together. But some current and former defense officials instead feared the security risk of sticking almost all of America’s top officers in the same room. And they dismissed Hegseth’s effort to bolster the military’s aggressive image through grooming standards and ending diversity programs.

“It‘s a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing,” said a former senior defense official. “It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.”

Apart from that it was a brilliant idea.

The Defense Department, which Trump has rebranded the Department of War, argued the event boosted morale and empowered military leaders.

Did it though? Did it boost morale? I seriously doubt that. And how did it empower military leaders? More like disempowered them, if anything.

But both within the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, people voiced worries about Hegseth’s remark that rules of engagement designed to protect civilians were “stupid” and Trump’s suggestion that the Pentagon would form quick reaction forces to quell upheaval in American cities.

“Deploying U.S. troops against U.S. citizens in American cities isn’t just unprecedented and unconstitutional — it’s UNAMERICAN,” Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), an Army veteran who served in Iraq, posted on X. 

Well, sadly, it’s now all too American. We can’t pretend this isn’t what we’ve become under the Monster.