War Secretary Pete Hegseth praised West Point cadets for being “not an army of woke” as he delivered the commencement speech to graduates of the U.S. Military Academy on Saturday.In his first visit to the academy as a Trump administration official, Hegseth lambasted the prior administration’s preoccupation with diversity rather than military readiness. “We must train exactly like we fight, and that means real, practical warfighting skills. It means lethality,” Hegseth said. “Let me be perfectly clear: you are not an army of one, and you are certainly not an army of woke. You are an American army, an army of warriors.”
“Four years ago, you raised your right hand and said, ‘Send me,'” he added, referencing the oath in their first year of school. “And today, as you join the ranks of the greatest fighting force in the history of the world, we stand together as one army, and we say, ‘Send us.'”
The secretary specifically took issue with the phrase “our diversity is our strength,” calling it the “single dumbest phrase in military history.”
“We had generals saying this with a straight face on national television. It was absolute nonsense,” Hegseth said. “Now, these sorts of silly things can be laughed at when they occur in a civilian lounge or civilian faculty lounge or debated in graduate seminars, but they cannot be tolerated in our formation. These ideas are what get people killed.”
