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Appears in 22 stories
Announced the livestream plan on Oct. 8; Trump canceled it on Oct. 15. Spokesman Sean Parnell said Trump and Hegseth were 'completely aligned.'
President Donald Trump canceled the livestream of Nidal Hasan's Dec. 3 firing squad execution on Oct. 15. The move reversed a Pentagon plan that drew bipartisan criticism.
Updated Yesterday
Stopped running required siting security reviews for wind projects from April 2026 until a federal judge ordered them resumed on August 6, 2026
All five East Coast wind farms that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum froze in December 2025 were back at work by early February, after federal judges in three districts granted preliminary injunctions. The building has gone on since: Ørsted's Revolution Wind finished offshore construction and has sent power to the New England grid since March, and Dominion's Coastal Virginia project is more than 80 percent built and delivering electricity.
Home to Project Meridian and the new Autonomous Warfare Command
Project Meridian is underway. Led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich, the Pentagon study met first in a classified room at Quantico on September 30. Oversight now sits with the nonprofit MITRE Corporation.
Updated 6 days ago
Executing extended deployment through 2026 amid litigation
The troops are still in Washington. The D.C. Circuit's stay kept the deployment in place while the appeal proceeds, and the mission continued through the 2026 election, with Guard members seen at ballot boxes in October.
Updated Oct 16
The agency led by Hegseth that impeachment targets
House Republicans left Washington on September 16 without voting on the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after Speaker Mike Johnson ended the session a day early. Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, who filed eight articles of impeachment the day before, said leaders canceled the session to avoid the vote.
Updated Oct 7
Implementing the 20% reduction to senior officer positions
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is cutting one in five positions reserved for generals and admirals, roughly 170 senior jobs across the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Space Force. He announced the move at his State of the Force address in Quantico, Virginia, on Sept. 30, doubling a reduction he ordered in May 2025.
Updated Oct 1
Won DC Circuit ruling upholding the Anthropic designation; parallel designation struck down in San Francisco; shifted classified work to Google, OpenAI, and xAI models
Anthropic's Claude became the first commercial AI model on classified U.S. military networks in late 2024. In March 2026, the Defense Department labeled the company a 'supply chain risk'—a tag once reserved for foreign adversaries—for refusing to allow mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons.
Updated Sep 26
Led by Pete Hegseth, who is reshaping senior military leadership
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll left office September 2 after 18 months, the latest departure in a Pentagon leadership shakeup. President Trump named Adam Telle, the Army's civil works chief, acting secretary the next day.
Updated Sep 16
Executing NATO asset cuts and conducting six-month European force review
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew to Brussels on June 18 and told NATO defense ministers the Pentagon will spend six months reviewing all American forces in Europe. Future US presence will depend on how fast European allies take primary responsibility for their own defense. He threatened to make US dues contributions to NATO 'contingent' on allies meeting spending targets and called it 'shameful' that some allies blocked American base access during the Iran war.
Updated Jun 18
Executing the withdrawal
U.S. troops have been stationed in Germany continuously since 1945. On May 1, 2026, the Pentagon ordered roughly 5,000 (about one in seven Americans in Germany) to leave over the next 6 to 12 months, taking a full brigade with them.
Updated May 31
Author of the new 'stable equilibrium' messaging
A year ago, the US defense secretary used the word Taiwan five times in his Shangri-La keynote. On Saturday in Singapore, Pete Hegseth did not say it once.
Updated May 30
Procurement talks ongoing as Ukraine seals Gulf-wide deals; requested initial specialist deployments
Russia began bombing Ukrainian cities with Iranian-made Shahed drones in October 2022. Over three and a half years later, Ukraine has transformed that threat into an exportable edge: low-cost interceptor drones, as cheap as $2,100 each, now handling over 70% of Shahed kills.
Transitioning AI provider from Anthropic to OpenAI
For decades, the United States military chose its weapons contractors and they complied, but artificial intelligence changed that. On March 3, OpenAI and the Pentagon amended a freshly signed AI contract to ban domestic surveillance of Americans—a concession the Pentagon had refused Anthropic, triggering the company's blacklist from all federal agencies.
Program administrator
The Pentagon spent $398 million on small drones in 2022. Four years later, as Ukraine demonstrated that $400 drones could destroy $10 million tanks, Congress authorized $1.7 billion—a fourfold increase. Now the Department of Defense has launched its most ambitious small-drone initiative ever: a $1.1 billion program to field more than 300,000 one-way attack drones by 2028, with the first 30,000 expected by mid-2026.
Updated May 26
Implementing reversed orders within nine days
On May 13, the Pentagon quietly halted a 4,000-soldier armored brigade already moving toward Poland. Nine days later, President Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States would send 5,000 additional troops to the same country.
Updated May 22
Implementing congressionally-mandated compensation increases
On January 1, 2026, every U.S. service member got a 3.8% pay raise, bringing an E-1's monthly check to $2,407. It's the third consecutive above-inflation increase Congress has delivered, part of a scramble to fix a system where junior troops qualified for food stamps.
Updated May 19
Publishing annual assessments of Chinese military capabilities
Chinese hackers have burrowed deep into America's power grids, water systems, telecommunications networks, and transportation infrastructure—not to steal secrets, but to flip a kill switch. The Pentagon's December 2024 report confirms Beijing expects to fight and win a war over Taiwan by 2027.
Updated May 16
Backstopping interdiction threat with ships, aircraft, and regional deployments.
Trump's Venezuela "blockade" threat is now backed by policy. Washington has added new Venezuela-linked sanctions and also targeted Iran's shadow-fleet network. Together, these expand the pool of already-sanctioned vessels that the U.S. Navy could board if they try to trade with Venezuela.
Updated May 15
Operating National Defense Areas and deploying troops on the border
Donald Trump has quietly turned long stretches of the southern border into de facto military bases. Under a new system of National Defense Areas, soldiers can stop migrants, hold them, and help prosecutors charge them as trespassers on military land.
Updated May 11
Gains record $901 billion authorization and acquisition reforms; faces travel‑budget restrictions if boat‑strike footage not provided to Congress.
President Trump signed a nearly $901 billion defense bill into law on December 18, 2025, cementing the 65th consecutive year Congress has passed a National Defense Authorization Act. It delivers troops a 3.8% pay raise and locks in $800 million for Ukraine weapons over two years.
Updated May 10
Implementing NDAA directives on force posture, Ukraine assistance, DEI policy rollback, and border deployments
Congress passed the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act in December 2025, authorizing a record $901 billion in national security spending. The House approved the final compromise 312–112 on December 10, and Trump signed it December 18 without an Oval Office ceremony.
Implements hemispheric military posture and anti‑cartel strikes
On December 5, 2025, the Trump administration released a 33-page National Security Strategy declaring a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The document formally revives the 19th-century idea of the Western Hemisphere as a U.S. sphere of influence and promises to reassert American preeminence across the Americas.
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