Trump, Hegseth and the making of a Maga 'warrior class'

The gathering of US military top brass is both bizarre and worrying.

- Jonathan Eyal Global Affairs Correspondent

For one moment, it looked like the security of the entire world was about to be upended.

With no forewarning and no explanation, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth suddenly ordered virtually all of his country's top military officers - those ranked one star and above - to return to the US for an urgent briefing.

It is hard to overestimate the sheer scale of this operation. With approximately 1.3 million active personnel, the US military has around 800 generals and admirals, spread across the globe. To have them all fly back home is a massive undertaking, entailing the global movement of thousands of high-security staff and costing millions of dollars. The US military has highly secure video teleconferencing facilities, designed precisely for such last-minute gatherings. So, if these facilities were not good enough for Mr Hegseth's emergency meeting, there was only one conclusion: the event in Quantico, Virginia, was of such importance and of such a high security classification that only a face-to-face meeting was considered acceptable.

And the reality? The United States' top brass, convened in one vast auditorium outside Washington, DC, on Sept 30, was treated to a banal speech about "warrior ethos" from Mr Hegseth, who zigzagged across the speaker's platform and waved his arms about in the manner of a young Ted Talk lecturer.

This was followed by a long, meandering monologue from President Donald Trump, who publicly wondered at one point why his generals and admirals were so quiet. He even joked that if those in attendance did not like what he had to say, they could leave the room but "there goes your rank, there goes your future", he added.

The initial speculation about the super-secret nature of the occasion came to nothing - the entire spectacle was broadcast live to the world.