Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has summoned nearly all of the US military’s top generals to Marine Corps Base Quantico next week — without telling them why.
The directive was given with short notice to generals stationed across the world, sowing concerns and confusion among the highest ranks, the Washington Post first reported on Thursday.
“The Secretary of War will be addressing his senior military leaders early next week,” Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told The Post in a statement.
Convening so many top military leaders in one location — and without stating a reason — is exceedingly rare, and presents a unique security risk.
“Are we really sure we want all these senior officers in one place?” one military analyst told The Post. “Seems like an ideal situation for the unthinkable.”
With little information, theories abound on what could be behind the call — from major national security issues to cutbacks and policy shifts.
It comes as Hegseth has been aiming to reduce numbers among top brass while filling out the lower rank-and-file troops, directing the Pentagon to cut its number of general officers by 20%.
There are roughly 800 generals and Navy admirals in the US military, who typically oversee hundreds to thousands of troops in the US and abroad.
The order “applies to all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, or their Navy equivalent, serving in command positions and their top enlisted advisers,” according to the Washington Post.
It also comes as the Pentagon has been nearing its final edits to the new national defense strategy for President Trump’s second term.
The new plan aims to shift US defense policy toward the Western hemisphere, sources familiar with Pentagon discussions have told The Post.
It would mark a major undoing of Trump’s deeply impactful 2018 strategy that set China and the Indo-Pacific as the priority theater of US engagement for the past seven years — even surviving the Biden administration.
The Pentagon did not provide an answer to The Post’s question involving the reasoning for the meeting.
