At a Turning Point USA Event in Tampa, Florida on Saturday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spoke about military 'rebuilding' under the Trump administration.
00:00You see, our warriors understand we're about to celebrate America 250, which is incredible.
00:17But our warriors understand you never get 1776 without 1775,
00:24when the first Americans picked up their rifle and said, this I will defend.
00:30Ideas are important. They're critically important if you look at the difference between this administration and the previous.
00:37Ideas are what Turning Point's all about. Back to basics, our founding principles.
00:42But if you're not able to defend those principles, you give them away.
00:47Either to foreign enemies or domestic ideologies that have a very different view of our country.
00:53And so at the DOD, we're back to basics, to the Constitution.
00:57We don't do politics. We do warfighting on behalf of the American people to keep everybody safe.
01:04Sound good?
01:06We're also rebuilding our military.
01:13In ways that President Trump did in his first term under Obama and Biden, the military was gutted.
01:20Not just with bad ideologies, but with insufficient funding and capabilities.
01:24President Trump's changed that.
01:25The one big, beautiful bill gave $150 billion in additional spending to DOD.
01:30We have the first trillion-dollar defense budget.
01:32Listen, let me tell you, I'm a fiscal hawk like a lot of people in here, too.
01:40I want to make sure taxpayer dollars are used wisely.
01:43And that's why I think DOGE and entities like that have been used as efficiently or even more aggressively in DOD than anywhere else.
01:50Because every dollar I can find in savings is a dollar I can reinvest in warfighting and readiness and capabilities, in the pointy end of the spear.
01:58So we've found tens of billions of dollars in savings, contracts we've eliminated, green initiatives that are gone, that we move over to President Trump's priorities.
02:10So when you look at Golden Dome for America, protecting the homeland.
02:14You look at the F-47, the world's first sixth-generation fighter jet.
02:19Drones, long-range fires, hypersonics, the way of war is changing.
02:28Our job is to see around the corner for you.
02:31Because, you know, those B-2 pilots, and by the way, the mechanics and the refuelers and the fighters,
02:37pilots don't fly themselves.
02:39It's like anything else.
02:40No one in the military serves themselves.
02:42A huge family and community supports them.
02:44But those B-2 pilots were able to fly in an exquisite machine 37 hours around the world
02:51because some American that I've never met 40 or 50 years ago designed that fighter, that bomber,
02:59was willing to spend political capital and effort and time to fund it and acquire it and field it
03:05so that a future president they'll never meet has maximum latitude and decision space to execute on behalf of the American people.
03:13My job is to work with our team to look the same way.
03:17What does warfighting of the future look like so that you and your kids and your grandkids in future America
03:26have the capabilities they need to be decisive and overwhelming on the battlefield?
03:32It's not just about the wars of today and how successful are we today, but are we making the tough call?
03:38See, it's easy to be aggressive and forward-leaning in this position when you have a boss in President Trump who puts a giant shield over you.
03:48And that's what it is.
03:49He ultimately is willing to take the slings and arrows.
03:51He's literally taken the shots so that the rest of us can go into our departments and say,
03:57now is the time to do what needs to be done.
04:00Make the difficult decisions that, you know, politicians in the past or bureaucrats in the past pushed aside because they were difficult.
