Hegseth says 20% of senior military officers will be cut, unveils new AI command

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the U.S. military has cut its ranks of generals and admirals by 20%, part of a "State of the Force" address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, according to ABC News and DW. He also unveiled a new four-star command focused on drones and artificial intelligence, called AUTOWARCOM, and other initiatives, ABC News reported.

The cuts follow a broader shake-up of the military's senior leadership under Hegseth, who has fired or sidelined a series of top officers without publicly explaining his reasoning, ABC News reported. There are currently 841 active-duty generals and admirals, according to Defense Department data cited by ABC News.

"The number crunchers say we fired 10% of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right," Hegseth said, according to ABC News. He said the department had cut overall general officer slots by another 10%, for a "20% reduction across the board" he called "accountability and long overdue," rejecting the term "purge."

Hegseth said the first 10% of firings targeted generals and admirals "who clung to the Woke Department" and treated civilian control of the military as a "suggestion," ABC News reported. He spoke to roughly 600 service members, including non-commissioned and junior officers, a year after delivering a similar address to generals at the same base, ABC News reported.

Hegseth also announced an Office of Religious Affairs with "a direct line to the secretary," saying the department was "putting on the full armor of God," according to ABC News. He did not specify what the office would do. He also criticized American journalists, calling partisan coverage that "smears the troops" a "national betrayal" and "treason," and said DEI programs had produced "politically correct quotas" leading to troops being led by "weak weirdos," ABC News reported.

For the new drone and AI command, Hegseth said "the pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it," pointing to Ukraine's use of drones against Russian forces, DW reported. He unveiled a task force called Project Meridien, led by Elon Musk, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, to "study the future of warfare," according to ABC News and DW. Hegseth said the task force would focus on "discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need," citing the need to dominate battlefields "from under the Earth to beyond the moon," DW reported.

Hegseth also said the U.S. would build a new domestic military base for the first time in 40 years and called on governors to pitch their states to host it, ABC News reported. He said major installations would be shifted off civilian power grids so that, as he put it, "our bases stay lit, our aircraft keep flying, our command centers never go dark" even under attack.

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy combat pilot, criticized the cuts, telling the Associated Press, as reported by DW, "He's purging a generation of great leaders of the military, and it's going to take a generation to recover from it." Republican Senator Mike Rounds, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he wanted to understand Hegseth's reasoning before judging the cuts, according to DW: "If it's simply a matter of eliminating a very heavy top, there may be some validity to it, but I want to see it first."