The Quantico Speeches
A Dangerous Reframing of the Military’s Mission
Preface: Why This Matters to Me
I write this essay not as another reflexive critique of the Trump administration—though some will no doubt dismiss it that way—but from a personal, and frankly painful, place. For more than forty years I’ve shared bonds of service with men and women I respect deeply, people I’ve deployed with, endured hardship alongside, argued strategy with late into the night, and trusted with my life. Yet today, I cannot reconcile their worldview with mine. They see Donald Trump as benign—a leader merely correcting the excesses of “the left.” When I raise concerns, the reply is almost always a whataboutism: What about FDR, Nixon, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden? Didn’t they all press the boundaries of presidential power? And on that point, they’re not wrong. Every president has tested the limits.
But this is different. Too many of my friends slide from fair points into false equivalencies. They convince themselves that if they parse the President’s words carefully enough, his meaning will appear acceptable. Yet when Trump talks about “cities in crisis” and “invasions from within,” when he declares the amorphous Antifa a terrorist organization, when he signs an executive order (NSPM-7) that defines “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” or deviation from “traditional American values of family, religion, and morality” as domestic terrorism—and then, in the same breath, tells generals and flag officers they must be ready to deploy into those “dangerous cities” to fight “internal enemies”—these are not hypotheticals. They are documented presidential actions and words. His defenders insist he’s only talking about training rotations or rhetorical posturing. They are deluding themselves.
They equate the deployment of federal forces in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—a response to a real and present disaster—with Trump’s idea of unleashing the military against a “crime emergency” that exists largely in his imagination. These are not the same. They never will be. And deep down, I know that if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had made the same claim, the very people who now parse and rationalize Trump’s words would have rushed to the barricades in fury.
That disconnect gnaws at me. It leaves me asking an uncomfortable question: am I the one out of step? Am I the one who doesn’t see it clearly? In blunt terms—what Reddit users would phrase as “Am I the asshole?”—I have to ask it of myself when I refuse to rationalize what others so easily excuse. This essay is my attempt to answer that question not with slogans, but with the disciplined analysis I was trained to do as a soldier and strategist.
Hegseth’s Stage: A Department of War, Inward Looking
Pete Hegseth, newly christened Secretary of War, set the stage on 30 September at Quantico with what sounded at first like a standard hard-edged address about making the military more lethal. He dusted off the familiar line: we are a Department of War, not a Department of Social Work. But rather than outlining the external threats the nation faces—from a revanchist Russia, to an assertive China, to the persistent challenges of terrorism and cyber warfare—Hegseth turned his gaze inward. His message was not about deterring adversaries abroad, nor about ensuring readiness for multi-domain combat, but about purifying the ranks, enforcing discipline, and reasserting martial toughness.
What was striking was not just what he chose to emphasize, but what he chose to omit. He did not identify, discuss, or even frame the threats that the Department must contend with. That lapse may have been unintentional, reflecting his desire to focus on internal issues and signal toughness within the ranks. But it may also have been calculated—to create a deliberate pause, a moment of suspense, before handing the stage to the President. The unspoken message: we are preparing for war, and the Commander-in-Chief will tell you where that war will be fought.
In doing so, Hegseth reframed the mission. Instead of speaking to the geopolitical landscape, he made the Department’s primary task a kind of internal cultural rectification. The rhetoric landed heavily in the hall, setting the expectation that Trump’s speech would not be about America’s global role—but about the President’s vision of how the military should be wielded at home.
Trump’s Turn: From Grooming Standards to Internal Enemies
President Trump took that stage Hegseth set and drove it further inward. He moved quickly from a perfunctory endorsement of grooming and discipline standards—haircuts, uniforms, physical fitness—to his larger theme: how he intends to employ the U.S. military.
The key line was chilling. He reminded the generals present of their oath: *“to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Then he leaned hard on the second half of that phrase, repeating it for emphasis: “domestic enemies.” He warned that the gravest threat to America was not in the Taiwan Strait or on the plains of Eastern Europe, but “the enemy from within.”
Trump then spoke of America’s “broken cities,” suggesting they could serve as live training grounds for the force. He told the assembled officers they would play a role in countering the “invasion” inside U.S. cities—a phrase that left little doubt he was envisioning the military in a domestic security role against American citizens.
This was not a policy speech about readiness or modernization. It was a political speech that conscripted the U.S. military into Trump’s broader war on his domestic opponents.
The Apologists’ Blind Spot
In the aftermath, several colleagues and friends shrugged off my concerns. What are you worried about? they asked. We’ve trained in U.S. cities for decades. 18D medics rotate through inner-city hospitals to practice trauma care. Units rehearse urban combat in abandoned neighborhoods. This is nothing new.
That reaction actually proves the danger. Trump was not talking about benign training rotations or medical internships. He was not speaking of Fort Polk–style urban exercises or humanitarian missions in American cities. His meaning was plain: to deploy military forces against Americans he casts as threats.
What makes this worse is the way apologists twist themselves into knots to excuse it. They take the very words Trump uses—phrases like “enemy from within” or “invasion”—and try to retrofit them into what they wish he had meant. It’s not that they don’t hear what he says; it’s that they can’t allow themselves to believe he actually means it. Because if they admitted he did, they’d have to reckon with the truth: he is endorsing the use of the U.S. military as an internal police force.
Deep down, they know the standard is inconsistent. If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had described American cities as “war zones” that required the galvanization of the military to restore order, they would have been incandescent with rage. They would have flooded the airwaves with accusations of tyranny, federal overreach, and the birth of a police state. But because Trump said it—because their political and emotional capital is invested in him as their hero—they rationalize and reinterpret.
Trump is not joking. He is not winging it. He is deadly serious. And the willingness of his movement to normalize and excuse his language is exactly how democratic protections get stripped away—not with a sudden collapse, but with a thousand quiet rationalizations. That kind of willful blindness is exactly what we once warned ourselves never to do when confronting irrational actors.
From Rational to Irrational Actors
And that is the point—when leaders or movements show us they are willing to act outside the bounds of reason, pretending otherwise is the most dangerous mistake of all. I saw this firsthand on the Joint Staff, where we built our strategies on the assumption of rational actors—until 9/11 forced us to confront the reality of irrational ones.
As a strategic planner, I worked on the National Military Strategy, the Chairman’s Joint Risk Assessment, the Secretary’s Net Assessment, and other key documents. In the 1990s, most of those assessments were grounded in the “rational actor model.” We assumed adversaries would respond predictably to deterrence, to pressure, to incentives, to diplomacy backed by force.
9/11 shattered that assumption. Al-Qaeda demonstrated what an “irrational actor” looks like—an adversary who cannot be deterred, cannot be bargained with, and cannot be reliably predicted within our usual framework of cost-benefit logic.
But al-Qaeda was hardly unique. Modern strategic thought often highlights how leaders like Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin operate in ways that deliberately blur rationality to gain leverage. They use the irrational facade as a tool—not because they lack strategic sense, but precisely because that ambiguity imposes costs on us in crafting responses.
Kim Jong Un has perfected this. His periodic missile tests, nuclear brinkmanship, and internal purges often appear erratic, even self-destructive. Yet scholars note that much of this is rational irrationality—the deliberate cultivation of unpredictability to deter adversaries or wring concessions. By forcing Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo to plan for the worst case every time, Kim multiplies his leverage without ever needing to match the West’s capabilities.
Putin does something similar. On some days, he behaves like a conventional realist, protecting Russian interests. On others, he escalates in Ukraine or rattles the nuclear saber in ways that defy Western assumptions about thresholds or proportionality. RAND analysts have warned that Putin is best understood not as wholly irrational, but as someone who slides along the spectrum—sometimes calculating, sometimes feigning unpredictability, but always in ways that keep the West reactive and hesitant.
As one theorist put it, what looks irrational to us is often simply alien rationality—a mode of thinking shaped by different histories, ideologies, constraints, or strategic culture. For our purposes, the danger is not in dealing with someone wholly irrational (that would be simpler), but in facing actors who selectively deploy irrationality as a lever to impose confusion, force over-planning, and exhaust our decision advantage.
That is precisely what we are seeing with Donald Trump. He is not irrational in the sense of being insane or unaware of consequences. He is irrational in the sense that his goals, motivations, and thresholds are alien to the constitutional order we assume anchors American decision-making. At Quantico, his invocation of “domestic enemies,” his talk of using American cities as training grounds, and his casual suggestion that the military might be deployed against U.S. citizens are not slips of the tongue—they are deliberate signals that redefine the role of the military outside its constitutional framework.
What makes this even more insidious is the way Trump bends the very language of the Framers. He uses the same phrases and concepts that the Founders enshrined—domestic enemies, energetic executive, commander-in-chief authority—so they sound familiar, even legitimate. But then he subtly shifts the intent. Where Hamilton and Madison envisioned an energetic executive to ensure decisive action while still tethered by checks, balances, and competing centers of power, Trump recasts those ideas into an argument for unfettered dominance. The language of focus and responsibility—originally meant to clarify roles and prevent drift—becomes in his hands the justification for erasing tension between branches of government altogether. Instead of balance, he preaches singularity. Instead of shared responsibility, he insists on personal primacy.
What looks reckless to most of us is, within Trump’s personal logic, entirely rational: by normalizing the idea of internal enemies and military deployment at home, he bends institutions toward his will, keeps opponents off balance, and conditions supporters to accept the extraordinary as routine. The words are recognizable, but the meaning has been inverted—the Constitution’s careful architecture of divided power retooled into a blueprint for presidential supremacy.
And that is where the danger crystallizes. Hegseth, by looking inward and speaking only of discipline and lethality, left the strategic vacuum into which Trump poured his vision. What should have been a dialogue about external challenges to American security became instead a redefinition of the military’s mission through the language of the Framers, bent and inverted to suit the purposes of one man. By cloaking his claims in the Constitution’s words while hollowing out their meaning, Trump reframed the oath from a pledge to defend the Republic into a mandate to defend his presidency. It was the moment where omission met distortion—where silence on real threats left room for the President to declare that the greatest threat was “within.”
Conclusion
To be fair, Pete Hegseth’s approach has its own logic. His instinct to go “mano a mano” with his senior leaders—to challenge them directly rather than drown them in platitudes—has a certain power. In a military culture that too often buries itself in sanitized assessments and bureaucratic jargon, a Secretary of War who insists on bluntness might believe he is forcing clarity. But toughness without substance is not strategy. By focusing inward—on grooming standards, discipline, and lethality—Hegseth left unspoken the global challenges that actually require collective thought and interactive dialogue with his commanders. He did not identify, discuss, or frame the external threats the Department must contend with. That omission may have been unintentional, reflecting his narrow focus on internal issues. Or it may have been calculated, setting up the President to step in as the one who would declare where the war would be fought.
It reminded me of a lesson from my time at U.S. Army Recruiting Command in the late 1980s. They sent us to a sales school where one of the techniques was simple: get an applicant nodding “yes” to a string of easy questions—Do you want to travel? Do you want job training? Do you want money for college?—all building momentum toward the final question: So, are you ready to enlist? Once you had them moving in that direction, “yes” often became reflexive. Hegseth employed the same technique. Do you want a fit force? Do you want to be more lethal? Do you want less administrative burden? Do you want to get rid of fat generals? Do you want to be examples of professionalism? The implied answers were all “yes.”
By the time Trump walked in, the generals were already leaning forward. When he delivered his punchline—Do you want to protect the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic? And remember, the greatest threat is from within—the intent was clear: use momentum to pull the military toward his vision.
I do not believe the senior leaders in that hall bought it—not then, and not wholesale. But that was never really the point. The point was to frame the choice so that resistance looked like disloyalty, and agreement looked like duty. It was less about immediate compliance than about conditioning—slowly shifting the ground so that extraordinary claims sound routine, and the military finds itself pulled, inch by inch, into domestic politics.
Hegseth’s speech was never really about strategy, readiness, modernization, deterrence, or even warfighting. By focusing inward and framing the problem as discipline, grooming, and toughness, he left the true challenges of the strategic environment untouched. What he offered instead was a setup—a series of questions designed to generate affirmation and momentum—so that when the President followed with talk of “domestic enemies” and using American cities as training grounds, the stage was already set. It was less about external defense than about establishing the conditions for loyalty tests still to come.
Those tests will not be about lethality or force design; they will be about obedience. They will come when generals and admirals are asked to choose between the Constitution and the man who claims to embody it, between the harder right and the easier—but far more dangerous—wrong. The danger of Quantico is not what was said that day, but what it prepares the ground for tomorrow.
Postscript:
A former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs once challenged me to string together three allusions in a single sentence—a Hobson’s choice, a Sisyphean task, and the Sword of Damocles. He said, “If you can do that, people will think you’re brilliant”. So, Admiral M, this one’s for you…
Looking back at Quantico, that’s exactly what our senior leaders now face: a Hobson’s choice between loyalty and duty, a Sisyphean task of defending constitutional norms against political corrosion, all while the Sword of Damocles hangs above them, waiting for the next test.