Trump and Hegseth set to meet with hundreds of military leaders as speculation grows

Washington – President Donald Trump and defense secretary Pete Hegseth plan to address hundreds of American military officials on Tuesday after the Pentagon suddenly asked high -level commanders around the world to meet in a base in Virginia without publicly revealing the reason.

The gathering at the base of the navy in Quantico near Washington fueled intense speculation on the objective and the value of the invocation of such a large number of generals and admirals in one place, with many parked in more than a dozen countries which include areas of conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Meetings between the best military brass and civilian leaders are nothing new. But the experts say that the scale of the rally, the haste with which it was called and the mystery that surrounds it are particularly unusual.

“The idea that the secretary will speak to the generals and give them his vision of the management of the department – and perhaps also for the strategy and the organization – which is perfectly reasonable,” said Mark Cancian, principal advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired colonel.

“What is mystifying is why it is in such a short time, why it is in person and what else could be involved,” he said.

The uncertainty comes while the country faces a potential government closure this week and as a Hegseth, which hammered the house an emphasis on lethality and what it calls “warrior ethics”, has taken several unusual and unexplained actions, including discounts of the number of general officers and the layoffs of other military leaders.

The news of the suddenly planned meeting broke out on Thursday, and the spokesperson for Pentagon, Sean Parnell, confirmed it but refused to publish more details.

Trump did not seem to know when journalists were questioned by an appearance of the oval office later during the day. The president said he “will be there if they want me, but why is this a big problem?”

A White House official said on Sunday that Trump would also speak during the rally. The president told NBC News that he and Hegseth “would talk about how we are doing militarily, speaking of being in great shape, of talking about many good positive things”.

Vice-president JD Vance argued last week that the media had transformed it into a “big story” and that he was “not particularly unusual that the generals who come up” from Hegseth come to speak to him.

Italian administrator Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, president of the NATO military committee, described the meeting as unusual and told journalists on Saturday after a NATO meeting in Riga, in Latvia, “as for 49 years of service, I have never seen him before.”

The absence of detailed information has prompted many people in Washington to speculate on the objective of the meeting. Anyway, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said that he suspected that there will be a dramatic element that could be “as important as any basic element”.

“The simple scale makes you ask you what type of significant interaction can occur,” said O’Hanlon, director of research for Brookings. “And therefore, he feels more theaters or trying to impose than trying to exchange views.”

Bryan Clark, principal member and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, said that he expects the meeting to focus on changing the Trump administration policy. The US military should focus less on Europe and Asia and more on the northern hemisphere, a change that breaks with decades as a previous one, he said.

Hegseth defended the role of soldiers in securing the American-Mexican border, deployment in American cities within the framework of Trump’s police and the effort of strikes on the Caribbean boats which indicate that the administration indicates targeted drug traffickers.

“I think they are trying to set the tone, to define the context, for these generals and the admirals to say that the strategy that we are getting out is very different from what you are used to – we need that you are all on board,” said Clark.

The video teleconference around the world is difficult because the leaders are distributed in time zones, said Clark. Forcing them to attend the meeting in person will make it possible to drill the return point.

“This is a way to demonstrate that it is important,” said Clark.

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The writer Associated Press Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.