Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). Around 800 US generals and admirals were ordered to Quantico (USA) on Tuesday from their US bases around the world to listen to hours of banal speeches by Trump and his Secretary of War Hegseth. Experts suspect that the harmless monster show was intended to cover up something else.
Hegseth’s speech focused mainly on tightening discipline in all parts of the US armed forces and on condemning the so-called ‘woke culture’ that prevailed in the Pentagon during the Biden administration. Hegseth declared: “No more identity months, no more DEI offices, no more men in women’s clothes. No more climate change cult. No more divisions, distractions or gender madness. No more rubbish.‘
’As I have said before and will say again – we are done with this nonsense,‘ emphasised the head of the newly renamed ’War Department”. In future, the focus will be exclusively on warfare and victory: ‘From this moment on, the sole mission of the newly restored War Department is to prepare for war and victory – unyielding and uncompromising in this pursuit.’
Hegseth also promised that the Pentagon would not participate in any further ‘nation building’ missions (democratisation, American style) such as those in Iraq or Afghanistan, seemingly unaware that this is exactly what is continuing to happen with the ongoing support for Ukraine. But none of those present pointed out this contradiction.
Trump spoke for about 70 minutes on military culture and political issues, proposing to expand the army and select only the best for military service: ‘We are considering expanding the army because we have so many people, and it’s nice to be able to weed people out based on performance and no longer take people who are unqualified for whatever reason, whether physical or mental.’ He also hinted at dismissals: ‘And, to be honest, we kicked a lot of them out of here. I didn’t want to do it, but we kicked a lot of you out of here because we weren’t satisfied.’
Trump then made the adventurous suggestion of using dangerous cities in the US, such as Chicago, as training grounds for the military and National Guard: “I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military […] We’re going to Chicago soon, which is a big city with an incompetent governor.‘ He responded to unrest in the streets with ’They spit, we hit,” legitimising military force against protesters.
Photos from the meeting clearly showed that the vast majority of generals and admirals looked bored and unimpressed. The thought that they had travelled halfway around the world for such meaningless talk, which sounded like a carbon copy of routine emails sent from Washington, must certainly have caused annoyance. Trump, accustomed to loud applause, was visibly irritated by how quiet the audience was and said: ‘I’ve never walked into a room this quiet.’ It was a call for loud applause that did not come. This apparently annoyed Trump so much that he asked anyone ‘who doesn’t like it here’ to ‘get up, leave the room and take your job and career with you’.
The meeting of the 800, which had been announced as a significant moment for the reorientation of the US armed forces, turned out to be an event of astonishing banality. The high cost of the generals’ travel was out of all proportion to the triviality of the messages conveyed by Hegseth and Trump. It is no wonder that experienced ‘conspiracy theorists’ such as former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson suspect something else entirely behind the purpose of this event. Johnson suspects something really big that took place behind the scenes in a small circle, which the large event was intended to distract from – something that would justify the costs in retrospect. In his email newsletter on 1 October, he wrote: “Apart from the massive concentration of US Navy units off the coast of Venezuela, we are currently hearing that US tanker aircraft are on their way to the Middle East via England. We observed the same phenomenon in the days leading up to the attack on Iran. So if the Trump administration is planning a coordinated attack on Venezuela and Iran, then the commanding officers of USCENTCOM and USSOUTHCOM would be involved.
Of course, the plans for these attacks could be discussed via secure video channels, but these types of meetings usually have dozens of listeners. To keep information about these plans to a select few, it must be done in face-to-face meetings, person to person. However, if only the CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM commanders and their top officers had been summoned to Washington, there would have been a high probability that someone would have smelled a rat.
The coming days and weeks will show whether Larry C. Johnson was right again this time.
