Pentagon Pete Flunks First Big Test With Misfiring War Rant [View all]

The defense secretary struggled to articulate any goals and attacked the press for basic questions.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the podium for the first time after Donald Trump launched his war in Iran to serve up a speech full of scripted lines and petty outbursts.

If the goal were to provide clarity and understanding on the U.S. objectives for its full-scale assault and what Americans should expect, the former Fox News personality came up miserably short on all fronts.

He contradicted himself. He contradicted the president. He became defensive when pressed by his own hand-picked Pentagon Press Corps to provide basic information, spouted partisan politics, and lacked empathy for the dead.

The defense secretary declared right off the bat that it would not be an endless war and insisted it was the opposite of the invasion of Iraq, while also refusing to set a timeline or rule out boots on the ground.

“I heard the question about four weeks,” Hegseth complained. “It’s the typical, typical NBC sort of gotcha type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take, four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up. It could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives we’ve set out to achieve.”

It was pointed out that the president himself said the war would likely last about four weeks on a call to the Daily Mail. He told the New York Times that it would take four to five weeks.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-pete-flunks-first-big-test-with-misfiring-war-rant/