Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is turning a culture-war slogan into a governing doctrine for the Pentagon’s next generation of weapons. His promise to build war-fighting artificial intelligence with “no woke rules” is colliding with a rapid push to wire the entire U.S. military around machine-speed decision making, and with a pop-culture flourish he has framed the goal as making “Star Trek real.” The stakes are not just rhetorical, but about who writes the rules for lethal code and whose values are embedded in it.
From Fox greenroom to War Department war room
The Honorable Pete Hegseth arrived at the War Department as a culture warrior with combat credentials and a television persona, and he is now using that platform to redefine what counts as acceptable restraint in military technology. According to his official biography, About his time in uniform includes deployments to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, experience he now cites as proof that battlefield realities should outweigh academic ethics boards. In public remarks highlighted in a viral clip of Secretary of Defense speaking on a Monday night, he cast himself as the man who will toss out the “old military industrial complex” and replace it with a leaner, more ideologically aligned war machine.
That posture now centers on artificial intelligence. In interviews and speeches, Jan reporting captured Hegseth’s blunt line in the sand: “We will not employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars,” he said, adding that military AI “will not be woke.” A follow up piece on Defense Secretary Pete underscored that he is not talking about a narrow software tweak but a wholesale rejection of AI guardrails he associates with corporate content policies and United Nations debates led by António Guterres. In his telling, those constraints are not neutral safety features but political filters that could stop a weapon from firing or a planner from seeing certain options.
“Star Trek real” meets Grok and an “AI-first” warfighting force
Hegseth’s most attention-grabbing line came when he stood alongside Elon Musk and flashed Mr. Spock’s “live long and prosper” salute, joking, “How about this. Star Trek real.” Coverage of that exchange noted how Hegseth used the moment to insist that the War Department would not be held back by “woke” policies and practices, even as online critics were quick to roast him for the sci‑fi theatrics. A separate account of the same event described how Hegseth leaned into the bit with Musk, using the “Star Trek real” line as shorthand for a future in which military AI acts as a constant, conversational copilot for commanders rather than a distant black box.
That future is already being prototyped through Musk’s own products. Reports on the Pentagon’s embrace of Musk’s Grok AI chatbot describe a system that can already help with tasks from drafting memos to analyzing open-source intelligence, with plans to wall off versions that could eventually touch classified networks. A companion piece, published Associated Press, noted that the same Grok AI is already available to paying users for everything from coding help to editing, raising alarms among critics who see a porous line between consumer chatbots and war planning tools. Hegseth, for his part, has praised Grok for allowing users to “fight wars” in simulations, a moment captured in coverage that showed Chairman of the Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth monitoring U.S. operations while he quipped that the Pentagon should feel more like a SpaceX control room than “an Ivy League faculty lounge.”
Behind the theatrics is a concrete restructuring of the defense bureaucracy around AI. One detailed account of the new strategy describes how the Department of War, or DOW, is being pushed to become an AI-first warfighting force, with work explicitly tied to Executive Order 14179, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intellige.” Another report on the Pentagon’s broader blueprint notes that the department has unveiled a sweeping Pentagon Unveils AI that leans heavily on partnerships with private-sector AI developers, effectively inviting companies like Musk’s into the heart of war planning. In that context, Hegseth’s “Star Trek” riff is less a joke than a mission statement: a promise that the same conversational systems civilians use on their phones will be weaponized, stripped of what he derides as “woke” constraints and wired into the chain of command.
Smashing “woke” guardrails and the risks of speed
Hegseth is not only rewriting the rhetoric around AI, he is also tearing up the process charts that once slowed new weapons programs. In a speech highlighted by defense reporters, he announced that The War Department would be the “exact opposite of SpaceX” in one respect, abolishing committees and other bureaucratic structures he sees as obstacles, while embracing the company’s culture of rapid iteration and a workforce that, in his words, “aren’t dudes in dresses.” A separate War Department release described a dedicated Speed “SWAT team” charged with removing barriers to efficient AI development, quoting Hegseth’s mantra that “speed wins; speed dominates” and assigning Stanley and his team at CDAO to define AI deployment velocity metrics for all the services. In that same document he boasted that they are “blowing up these barriers,” a phrase that, in the context of lethal autonomy, reads as both metaphor and warning.
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