by
Austin BayOctober 1, 2025
On Sept 30, President Donald Trump and Secretary of War (SecWar) Pete Hegseth held a most unusual convocation of "several hundred generals and admirals" at the Marine base and training area in Quantico, Virginia.
I couldn't find an open-source figure for the precise number of flag ranks present. This metaphor should work: Hegseth and Trump addressed a galaxy of American military stars, from one to four on the shoulders of the attendees.
Major media tended to treat the event in two superficial and unproductive ways. Overt lefties (descendants of Vietnam-era draft resisters) condemned it with archaic 1930s European Fascist and Marxist rhetoric. But they do that with every subject, even hurricanes.
The tabloid types went Hollywood macho. But the tabloids got some of the truth: President Trump and SecWar Hegseth want lean, mean warriors exhibiting The Spirit of the Bayonet.
What is The Spirit of the Bayonet? To kill, drill sergeant!
CNN can satirize, The New Yorker belittle, but when your job is creating combat soldiers out of high school kids that eat way too many hot dogs, the drill sergeants' sweat, pain, running, mud, weapons drill, pushups and debasing but mentally toughening ridicule routine has a war-winning record.
At least when the political class lets them win. That's been the rub since Vietnam. The specter of nuclear war is a factor. But the Ukraine war has demonstrated for the umpteenth time in history that creative warfighters with raw guts and physical stamina supplied with competitive technology can stymie nuclear-armed megalomaniacs like Vlad Putin. Guts and stamina matter -- hence Hegseth saying flat out no more fat generals. None. And to hell with gender pronoun blather.
Trump delivered the convocation's key strategic messages:
1. His administration has the warfighters' backs.
2. America faces an invasion from within.
That's absolutely key.
America faces a calculated and foreign enemy-incited and energized war of disintegration. Communist China is the chief adversary, but Russia and Iran participate. The War of Disintegration has several goals. The foremost goal is to weaken domestic political will to resist the foreign adversaries. That involves psychological warfare, but The War of Disintegration includes economic sabotage and violence. Cyberattacks that knock out electrical grids. Cyberattacks that damage communications systems. Theft -- by cyber robbery or physical robbery.
Outright violent destruction in American cities is a tool. This isn't fable. "Restorative Justice" district attorneys encourage violent crime. Then businesses in their cities shutter and the economically creative flee. Portland, Oregon. Chicago. Baltimore. New York City has lost its economic edge. Visceral community fragility.
Who funds the "Restorative Justice" DAs? They are also called Soros DAs. Who funds George Soros? Good question.
But how does this involve the Pentagon? Drugs destroy lives, and ultimately destroy communities. China knows. The Opium War weakened China. So China wages fentanyl war on America, with the same goal. China's drug war allies: Mexican and Colombian drug cartels and the Venezuelan government.
All are heavily armed -- and the Mexican cartels are on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Twelve million illegal immigrants pouring over an international border swamp city and state social safety nets. This seeds violence and anarchy. Theoretical? Hah. Tell it to Joe and Josephine Sixpack. They don't live in a gated community. They see it, and hear the gunfire.
Human trafficking is a 21st-century offensive weapon. Three of the top human trafficking nations (as in financing, directing and aiding trafficking operations) are definitive American enemies: Russia, Communist China, and North Korea.
Step back, look at the jigsaw puzzle facts and the design emerges.
In a disintegrative war, a "unitary belligerent becomes increasingly fragmented by secessions."
In 2010, China's People's Liberation Army published a treatise on disintegration warfare. In a Joint Forces Quarterly article published in April 2014, Dr. Fumio Ota (a retired vice admiral in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force) wrote: "The idea of (Chinese) disintegration warfare includes politics, economy, culture, psychology, military threats, conspiracy, media propaganda, law, information, and intelligence."
Open borders. Deadly drugs. Disintegrating cities.
The Pentagon has a role in this war.