WASHINGTON — In a surprising pivot that has upended the national security establishment, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced this morning that the Department of Defense will cease all operations related to warfighting and instead shift its entire focus toward lethality.
“War is not lethality," Hegseth said in an announcement video while wearing a sequined American flag cowboy hat and mounted on a horse that was standing on an Abrams tank in the Pentagon's parking lot.
"Lethality is a bigger concept,” he said. “It's more of a mindset or a vibe than a coherent capability you can measure. In fact, it is my understanding that lethality can't really be defined at all. It literally isn't in the dictionary, right?" asked Hegseth while he looked at Senior Advisor for Flags in the Background Ricky Buria, who nodded vigorously and gave the defense secretary a thumbs up while holding the horse's reins.
"President Trump kept forwarding me these videos of guys from Russia or China or North Korea jumping through flaming hoops or screaming their heads off, and he kept asking why we couldn't do that," said Hegseth. "And he wasn't buying our explanation that when they actually tested us, like at Khasham, we basically killed every last one of them. What we eventually realized was that it wasn't about what we could do at war, or even about killing the enemy. It was about lethality."
Hegseth then explained his vision of lethality.
"We all know that perception is reality, it's one of the big things I learned as a captain ten years ago," he began. "Even kids know it. If you show them an Olympian with a gold medal for wrestling and a guy from the WWE and ask which one's a better wrestler, they'll pick the pro wrestler every time. That's lethality, an intuitive understanding based on perception, not metrics and data that can be skewed and interpreted whichever way."
"My new directive aims to use investments in lethality and divestments of warfighting to turn the Department of Defense from an Olympian into a pro wrestler."
Highlights of Hegseth's plan include:
- Deterrence selfies: To enhance lethality while also conserving funds, instead of using forward deployments to deter enemies and rivals by demonstrating the ease and speed of force projection, the services will focus on having troops deter foreign enemies by taking pictures of themselves holding weapons in training and posting them to social media.
- Disbanding TRANSCOM and DLA: This will be done partly because projecting vibes of lethality requires far less sustainment than supporting forces with transportation, food, fuel, and ammunition, but mostly because "logistics is boring" and having trans in the name makes TRANSCOM "sound gay."
- Scrapping the Fleet: The surface fleet will be scrapped and turned into razor blades that will be used to force black service members with pseudofolliculitis to shave. Hegseth repeatedly emphasized that regardless of the lethality initiative's sweeping changes, beards would remain prohibited, partly due to the special forces community's insistence that maintaining their current level of lethality required having at least some regulations to ignore.
- Less ammo, more accessories: Following the lead of ICE, all ammunition funds will be redirected to rifle customizations to help service members further express themselves. Due to the lack of ammunition, troops will now train by aiming at targets and making gunfire noises, then observers will decide where they feel the rounds would have impacted based on troops' volume, intensity, rifle builds, and other less tangible lethality factors.
- Callsigns: All service members will now have a callsign, which they will choose. Hegseth identified this as his single most significant lesson learned from observing Russia's war in Ukraine. Service members will use this unique callsign to begin to flesh out a persona that broadcasts high levels of lethality, and Hegseth suggested the possibility that these callsigns and personas might eventually be tracked on file cards similar to those that came with G.I. Joe action figures in the 1980s.
- War Department: In a sign that Hegseth may not be totally abandoning the concept of war in his drive for lethality, he announced a return to the name "War Department." However, this was originally the name of the Department of the Army, not the Department of Defense, which was created by combining the War Department with the Department of the Navy in 1947. As a result of this confusion, the Department of the Army has already returned to the name War Department, while the Department of Defense has been renamed the Also War Department.