Page 3 - Us Pentagon

Pentagon chief Hegseth imposes sweeping press restrictions amid leak fears

Bedeviled by leaks to the media during his short tenure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a series of restrictions on the press late Friday that include banning reporters from entering wide swaths of the Pentagon without a government escort areas where the press has had access in past administrations as it covers the activities of the world's most powerful military. Newly restricted areas include his office and those of his top aides and all of the different locations across the mammoth building where the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Space Force maintain press offices. The media will also be barred from offices of the Pentagon's senior military leadership, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen Dan Caine, without Hegseth's approval and an escort from his aides. The staff of the Joint Chiefs has traditionally maintained a good relationship with the press. Hegseth, the former Fox News Channel personality, issued his order via a posting on X late on a Friday afternoon ...

Hotline between military, Washington air traffic controllers down for 3 yrs

A hotline between military and civilian air traffic controllers in Washington, D.C., that hasn't worked for more than three years may have contributed to another near miss shortly after the US Army resumed flying helicopters in the area for the first time since January's deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter, Sen. Ted Cruz said at a hearing Wednesday. The Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of air traffic controllers, Frank McIntosh, confirmed the agency didn't even know the hotline hadn't been working since March 2022 until after the latest near miss. He said civilian controllers still have other means of communicating with their military counterparts through landlines. Still, the FAA insists the hotline be fixed before helicopter flights resume around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Defence department officials didn't immediately respond to questions Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month and the steps it is

Pentagon orders removal of books on diversity, anti-racism, gender issues

The Pentagon has ordered all military leaders and commands to pull and review all of their library books that address diversity, anti-racism or gender issues by May 21, according to a memo issued to the force on Friday. It is the broadest and most detailed directive so far on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's campaign to rid the military of diversity and equity programmes, policies and instructional materials. And it follows similar efforts to remove hundreds of books from the libraries at the military academies. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the memo, which was signed Friday by Timothy Dill, who is performing the duties of the defence undersecretary for personnel. Educational materials at the libraries promoting divisive concepts and gender ideology are incompatible with the Department's core mission, the memo states, adding that department leaders must promptly identify books that are not compatible with that mission and sequester them by May 21. By then, the memo says,

Pentagon orders removal of up to 1,000 transgender troops from military

The Pentagon will immediately begin moving as many as 1,000 openly identifying transgender service members out of the military and give others 30 days to self-identify, under a new directive issued Thursday. Buoyed by Tuesday's Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to enforce a ban on transgender individuals in the military, the Defence Department will then begin going through medical records to identify others who haven't come forward. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who issued the latest memo, made his views clear after the court's decision. "No More Trans @ DoD," Hegseth wrote in a post on X. Earlier in the day, before the court acted, Hegseth was more blunt, telling a conference that his department is leaving wokeness and weakness behind. "No more pronouns," he told a special operations forces conference in Tampa. Department officials have said it's difficult to determine exactly how many transgender service members there are, but medical records will show th

Trump plans record $1.01 trillion national security budget this year

The defense budget will fund the Golden Dome missile defense project, shipbuilding and nuclear modernization, border security among its top priorities

Pete Hegseth orders Army to merge commands, cut jobs to reduce costs

The Army is planning a sweeping transformation that will merge or close headquarters, dump outdated vehicles and aircraft, slash as many as 1,000 headquarters staff in the Pentagon and shift personnel to units in the field, according to a new memo and US officials familiar with the changes. In a memo released Thursday, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the transformation to build a leaner, more lethal force. Discussions about the changes have been going on for weeks, including decisions to combine a number of Army commands. US officials said as many as 40 general officer slots could be cut as a result of the restructuring. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues. The changes come as the Pentagon is under pressure to slash spending and personnel as part of the broader federal government cuts pushed by President Donald Trump's administration and ally Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. In his memo, Hegseth said the Army must eliminate wastef

Trump defends Hegseth amid Pentagon turmoil, Signal chat leak probe

Trump backed Hegseth after ex-Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot said the Defence Department is overwhelmed by staff drama and turnover in the early months of Trump's second term

Pete Hegseth's Pentagon faces 'full-blown meltdown,' warns ex-spokesman

The warning from John Ullyot, who resigned last week after initially serving as Pentagon spokesman, followed statements by three top officials who were reportedly fired amid inquiry into leaks

Senate confirms Elbridge Colby as Pentagon policy chief despite GOP split

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed the appointment of Elbridge Colby to be the top policy adviser at the Pentagon, overcoming concerns that he has downplayed threats from Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. The vote was 54-45, with Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as the only Republican voting against him. Three Democrats voted for Colby. In a statement, McConnell said Colby's long public record suggests a willingness to discount the complexity of the challenges facing America, the critical value of our allies and partners. And McConnell said Colby's confirmation encourages isolationist perversions of peace through strength to continue apace at the highest levels of administration policymaking. Vice President JD Vance criticized McConnell in an X post, saying that the senator's no vote - like so much of the last few years of his career - is one of the great acts of political pettiness I've ever seen. Vance spoke at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing early last month to

Pentagon backtracks on content purge, restores posts on women, minorities

Every day over the past few weeks, the Pentagon has faced questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages after it purged online content that promoted women or minorities. In response, the department has scrambled to restore a handful of those posts as their removals have come to light. While the pages of some well-known veterans, including baseball and civil rights icon Jackie Robinson, are now back up on Pentagon websites, officials warn that many posts tagged for removal in error may be gone forever. The restoration process has been so hit or miss that even groups that the administration has said are protected, like the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military pilots who served in a segregated World War II unit, still have deleted pages that as of Saturday had not been restored. This past week chief, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a video that ..

Pentagon latest agency to announce leak probe that could include polygraphs

The Pentagon's intelligence and law enforcement arms are investigating what it says are leaks of national security information. Defense Department personnel could face polygraphs in the the latest such inquiry by the Trump administration. A memo late Friday from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's chief of staff referred to recent unauthorised disclosures of such information, but provided no details about alleged leaks. Earlier in the day, President Donald Trump rejected reports that adviser Elon Musk would be briefed on how the United States would fight a hypothetical war with China. If this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorised disclosure," then such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal entity for criminal prosecution, according to the memo. At the Homeland Security Department, Secretary Kristi Noem pledged this month to step up lie detector tests on employees in an effort to identify those who may be leaking informati

Elon Musk meets Pentagon officials, demands prosecution of leakers

Earlier on Friday, before arriving at the Pentagon, Musk lashed out at the New York Times, calling it pure propaganda. I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon

Trump likely wants minerals refining on Pentagon bases to boost US output

Move is one of several planned for an executive order Trump could sign as soon as Wednesday after he told the US Congress last week he would 'take historic action'

Court-martial hearing to begin for Pentagon leaker facing years in prison

Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira, who was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison for leaking highly classified military documents, is scheduled to begin his court-martial on additional charges Monday. Teixeira pleaded guilty last year to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information under the Espionage Act, following his arrest in the most consequential national security breach in years. In his court-martial, Teixeira faces charges of disobeying orders and obstructing justice. At a hearing last year, military prosecutors said a court-martial is appropriate given that obeying orders is the absolute core of the military. But Teixeira's lawyers argued that further action would amount to prosecuting him twice for the same offense. The court-martial panel is convening at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. The leaks exposed to the world unvarnished secret assessments of Russia's war in Ukraine, including information about .

War heroes among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon's DEI purge

References to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and the first women to pass Marine infantry training are among the tens of thousands of photos and online posts marked for deletion as the Defense Department works to purge diversity, equity and inclusion content, according to a database obtained by The Associated Press. The database, which was confirmed by U.S. officials and published by AP, includes more than 26,000 images that have been flagged for removal across every military branch. But the eventual total could be much higher. One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public, said the purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content. The official said it's not clear if the database has been finalized. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given the militar

Pentagon denies report of halt in offensive cyber operations against Russia

Hegseth has neither canceled nor delayed any cyber operations directed against malicious Russian targets

Pentagon to send about 3,000 more active-duty troops to US-Mexico border

The Pentagon is sending about 3,000 more active-duty troops to the US-Mexico border as President Donald Trump seeks to clamp down on illegal immigration and fulfil a central promise of his campaign, US officials said Saturday. His defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has ordered elements of a Stryker brigade combat team and a general support aviation battalion for the mission, the Pentagon announced. The forces will arrive along the nearly 2,000-mile border in the coming weeks. The Defence Department's statement did not specify the size of the deployment, but it was put at about 3,000 by the officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The Strykers are medium-armoured wheeled personnel carriers. Already, about 9,200 US troops in total are at the southern border, including 4,200 deployed under federal orders and about 5,000 National Guard troops under the control of governors. The new troops will reinforce and expand current bor

Transgender troops being identified, to be removed under Pentagon orders

The military services have 30 days to figure out how they will seek out and identify transgender service members to remove them from the force a daunting task that may end up relying on troops self-reporting or tattling on their colleagues. A memo sent to Defense Department leaders on Thursday after the Pentagon filed it late Wednesday as part of a response to a lawsuit orders the services to set up procedures to identify troops diagnosed with or being treated for gender dysphoria by March 26. They will then have 30 days to begin removing those troops from service. The order expands on the executive order signed by President Donald Trump during his early days in office setting out steps toward banning transgender individuals from serving in the military. The directive has been challenged in court. Initial but incomplete counts of transgender troops easily identifiable through medical records is in the hundreds, US officials said. That's a tiny fraction of the 2.1 million troops .

Pentagon orders purge of social sites to dump diversity mentions by March 5

Building lethality in the military may be the buzzword for the new Trump administration, but busywork and paperwork have become the reality at the Pentagon, as service members and civilian workers are facing a broad mandate to purge all of the department's social media sites and untangle confusing personnel reduction moves. On Wednesday, the department's top public affairs official signed and sent out a new memo requiring all the military services to spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. If they can't do that by March 5, they have been ordered to temporarily remove from public display" all content published during the Biden administration's four years in office, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Associated Press. The new directive comes as the military services also are scrambling to identify probationary workers the administration has targeted f

Pentagon says it will cut 5,400 probationary workers starting next week

The Defence Department has said that it's cutting 5,400 probationary workers starting next week and will put a hiring freeze in place. It comes after staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, were at the Pentagon earlier in the week and received lists of such employees, US officials said Friday. They said those lists did not include uniformed military personnel, who are exempt. Probationary employees are generally those on the job for less than a year and who have yet to gain civil service protection. "We anticipate reducing the Department's civilian workforce by 5-8 per cent to produce efficiencies and refocus the Department on the President's priorities and restoring readiness in the force," Darin Selnick, who is acting undersecretary of defence for personnel and readiness, said in a statement. Probationary employees are generally those on the job for less than a year and who have yet to gain civil service protection. President Donald Trump's administration