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War Secretary Pete Hegseth opened a Pentagon news conference Tuesday detailing a covert visit to troops fighting in Operation Epic Fury, noting America’s service men and women are ramping up “wartime speed” and the only thing they need to see from U.S. leadership is “more bombs.”
“To a man and to a woman on the ground, in the air, on the flight line, and in the TOC [technical operations center] I heard, ‘We want everything faster, higher up-tempo, wartime, speed,’” Hegseth said.
The speed left Hegseth marveling, but the resolve left him proud, he said.
“‘Please thank the president from us’: I heard that time and time again,” Hegseth said. “I asked each young American, ‘What do you need?’ And nobody said better equipment. Nobody said more comfortable living conditions. Nobody said, send me home.”
“Well, of course, eventually we want all those things; they do too,” Hegseth acknowledged. “But what those Americans said to me, young and old, officer and NCO, male and female, Black and white, was: ‘Let’s finish the mission. Get us even more bombs. Bigger bombs, more targets. Let us finish this.'”
Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Dan Caine spoke to just that, hailing the speed of “these great Americans” feeding the “national industrial base.”
“Today, I want to recognize a group of Americans who live at the beginning of our nation’s combat power, the Americans who actually make our weapons both inside our defense industrial base, but even more broadly inside our national industrial base,” Caine said in his opening remarks at the news conference.
“In every military option, we could not and cannot do our jobs without the men and women across our country who show up every day around the clock to a factory floor, a workshop, a laboratory, who build the weapons and capabilities we need to project American combat power at the time and place of our choosing,” he said.
