Retired Army Special Forces officer Mike Nelson criticized Hegseth's rhetoric, stating, 'That's a necessary end to achieve goals through military force - you have to kill people to achieve them. That's not the end. It's a weird obsession with death for the sake of it.'
Hegseth stated that current policies have essentially turned US military installations into gun-free zones, leaving those who live and work on the installations vulnerable. He emphasized that the war department's uniformed service members are trained at the highest standards and are entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms.
The Pentagon has dismissed the report, stating that neither Hegseth nor any of his representatives approached BlackRock about any such investment. Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell called the report 'entirely false and fabricated,' demanding a retraction from the Financial Times.
The Pentagon blackballed its own newspaper from covering its own press conference? Reminder, Stars & Stripes employees are US Army civilians. Their editorial independence is protected by Congress specifically to prevent political leaders from feeding troops propaganda.
Iran has accused the U.S. and Israel of killing more than 1,300 civilians and striking over 10,000 civilian sites during the first 12 days of the war. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described Tuesday as the "most intense day" of U.S. attacks on Iran to date.
In military terms, this means that even those who have surrendered will be killed, explains Jacqueline Hellman, an expert in international law at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The statement "alludes to a practice that is expressly prohibited," she told DW, adding that, as mere rhetoric, this is not punishable. But, she explained, such a statement could be classified as a war crime if it is formulated as an order and results in corresponding actions by the armed forces.
In a February 19 memo sent to civilians across the DoD, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth wrote that he expects "every supervisor to encourage their civilian employees to volunteer. Leadership must continue to promote this detail program and educate their civilian employees on its importance."
May almighty God continue to bless our troops in this fight. And again, to the American people, please pray for them every day on bended knee with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ. To the troops, keep going and Godspeed.
Speaking from the SpaceX headquarters in South Texas on Monday, Secretary of Defense, sorry, War (and gargantuan stain on our patriotic conscience) Pete Hegseth announced Grok will join Google's Gemini to be a part of the Pentagon's new internal AI platform (GenAI.mil) later this month. "Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," he said. (Here's a fine example of this "leading model" in action.) "AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we're going to make sure that it's there."
