‘Loyalty’ and the ‘Bizarre’: Current, Former Military, Defense Officials Question US Leadership Post-Quantico

The gathering of the United States’ highest ranking generals and admirals at U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia on Sept. 30 was the “most bizarre thing I’ve seen in my time on Earth,” said Larry Wilkerson, an ex-United States Army colonel and former chief of staff to past Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Wilkerson and a slew of others spoke with Military.com in the aftermath of the impromptu assembly of the United States’ starred service members one month ago, warning that the Armed Forces currently helmed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are in a state of disarray most haven’t seen in their hundreds of years of combined military and defense service.

The scene was endemic of broader political and socioeconomic divisions throughout the first nine months or so of Trump’s executive order-laden second term, in which the president and his administration have been aggressive in enforcement involving immigration and more recently the National Guard in multiple American cities. It sparked continued debate over the role of the U.S. military in American politics and society at large, of which both have been intertwined since the nation’s inception, and concerns of a traditionally apolitical constitutional fixture espousing partisan rhetoric.

The Quantico “loyalty test” as one retired service member described may have far wider implications for the future of the U.S. military and those who serve in it. Officials who spoke to Military.com warned of the potential of Trump and Hegseth sycophants replacing outgoing military members who disagree with the so-called warrior ethos mentality—while others connected the administration’s military approach to a broader, government-wide takeover rooted in greed, power, and arguably the most open embrace of Christian nationalism in the nation’s history.

“Certainly in my 40 years of government service for both the president and the secretary of war, it was just bizarre,” Wilkerson said.

Beyond the security implications and cost associated with galvanizing the generals and admirals, Wilkerson said that the messages from both Trump and Hegseth were “a little bit different but complementing each other quite well.”

“Hegseth essentially said, ‘I want you all to be killers, I want you to be killers for America. I want you to be killers for the flag. I want you to be killers under all circumstances where I give you orders to go to war or to do something that I’ve given you an executive order for. I want you to be that kind of person,’” he said.

‘New But Familiar’

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told Military.com that Hegseth’s speech “cemented a new but familiar culture we refer to as the warrior ethos.”

“His message was simple: promotions and combat assignments will be given based on merit and ability, not diversity quotas,” Parnell said. “The war on warriors is over; political correctness has no home at the Department of War. Physical fitness standards will be high, uniform and sex-neutral, ensuring our warriors are prepared to fight and win in any arena, no matter the circumstances.

“These core principles have been the foundation of our force for generations and drive our entire institution.”

The same message is being pontificated from the White House.

“President Trump was proud to join Secretary Hegseth’s event to reignite warrior ethos within his top brass and reinforce the rigorous standards that once made our military the best in the world,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told Military.com. “These anonymous ‘criticisms’ are nonsense. The president is fully behind the secretary’s efforts to restore readiness and lethality within the Department of War.”

‘Slippery Slope’

The Quantico gathering included speeches from both Hegseth and President Donald Trump, the former calling to minimize the number of “fat generals” while enforcing stricter military facial hair policies across branches. He mentioned achieving a “higher male standard” that some have surmised is the Defense Department’s (now federally known as the “War Department”) attempt to push some females out of the military altogether.

Hegseth also railed against “woke garbage” infiltrating forces and implored service members to embrace the administration’s aforementioned “warrior ethos,” with those not getting on board encouraged to resign.

An Air Force general who was in the room on Sept. 30 spoke to Military.com on the condition of anonymity, saying that when they first learned of the intended gathering, it was perceived as a “loyalty check.” There was even a thought that some admirals and generals would be forced to resign on [the] scene.

“But then as time went on, we realized that it was going to be such a public forum and that was just unrealistic—that it probably was just going to be what we ended up seeing: a very scripted speech and very partisan speech,” said the general with decades of service. “There were a lot of fears going into it.

“My chief and I kind of war-gamed it ahead of time, like, ‘Hey, if this happens, how will we react? If people stand up and clap, will we sit? Will we stand and not clap? How are we going to handle these situations? Or if [Hegseth] asks us to do something that is so completely against our morals and values, will we just walk out of the room?’”

The general said Hegseth’s remarks induced a “slippery slope” of what may happen moving forward, including potential harassment of minority and female military members that may discourage their service altogether and lead to resignations. Even making formal complaints could become cumbersome.

“We’ve never had a secretary of defense speak even remotely in a partisan way the way this man [Hegseth] does,” the general added, claiming Hegseth’s brand of conservatism has been invoked in the traditionally nonpartisan Armed Forces. “That’s discouraging because obviously the military isn’t a political organization, or at least we’re not supposed to be. So, that was hard, it was a slap in the face.

“I thought all of those generals and senior enlisted leaders and admirals who were in the room who had dedicated their lives to this, and then for their ultimate leader to just say the things that he said, was just incredibly frustrating.”

An anonymous senior-level Defense Department official with decades of experience had the following reaction when news of the Quantico gathering spread: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

They said the situation harkened back to Hegseth’s words following his initial appointment, from Fox News co-host to oversee the world’s most powerful military, which was effectively described as a pro-Trump campaign speech devoid of specifics.

“That’s what I was anticipating, here’s another campaign plan speech,” the official said. “It’s going to be about men and women in the military, and a snot-nosed major in the National Guard talking down to seasoned senior officers who have 30, 40, 45 years as military professionals.

“That’s what I thought, and that’s exactly what he delivered.”

They “couldn’t believe” they were seeing generals being talked down to “as if they were platoon leaders…being used as pawns in sort of a public relations, political demonstration.”

An anonymous sergeant in the U.S. Army, who was not present that day in Quantico, told Military.com that the entire scene surrounding that day’s events was “disturbing.”

“It was just very scary because my feeling when I first heard about all this was that Hegseth and Trump want to get a loyalty oath out of the military to void our loyalty to the Constitution, to protect the American people and pledge loyalty to them no matter what,” the sergeant said. “It reminds me of Hitler’s rise to power.”

The uniformed member described the situation as ironic, due to the “complete incompetence coming from this administration” and how it could “save” Americans and the military itself.

Asked to elaborate, the sergeant was blunt in his perspective: “These guys are just incredibly stupid, they keep f****** up so much.”

“Hegseth has been involved in so many Signal scandals he can’t save himself,” the sergeant said. “There are leaks constantly going on, even though he’s trying to find the leakers. He is the most unqualified and most incompetent secretary of defense that we’ve ever had, and he needs to go.

“And morale, from what I have seen, is very, very low in the military—like I’ve never seen it before.”

Parnell told Military.com that current, former service members and defense officials who are speaking out anonymously in the media “should put their names to their comments if that’s what they truly believe in and consider resigning from their post.”

“Our warriors deserve senior leaders who support the mission and put warfighting first,” Parnell said.

Reaction To The ‘Show’

Marty France is a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general who spent more than a decade as Permanent Professor and head of the Department of Astronautics and Engineering at the USAF Academy.

“I thought that the generals and the senior enlisted advisors handled it in the absolute perfect manner that our military should,” France told Military.com. “In other words, they respectfully received the message and went on their way. They didn’t really, as a group, show any emotion. They, of course, didn’t show any disrespect either and sat quietly and received the message.”

The concerns of the 1981 Air Force Academy graduate and parent of a 2006 graduate mimicked others regarding “loyalty” pledges and meeting in person when the addresses that day could have theoretically been conducted virtually. The presentations by Trump and Hegseth were antithetical to the way service members responded, he added.

“I think the message that was sent to the rest of America, that our military does insist on standing above the fray and remaining apolitical while obeying the orders of our legal superiors, is absolutely the correct message,” he added. “I couldn’t have been prouder of how they handled it.

“And I think it also demonstrated how incompetent and bumbling the two speakers at the event were.”

France mentioned how Hegseth tasked the roughly 2.1 million currently serving service members to watch his speech or read the transcript by Oct. 31, 2025.

“I absolutely think that’s a wonderful idea,” France said. “I want everyone to see what a complete bumbling mess he is and to see how silly and unprofessional and incoherent the rantings of both of them were.

“I think that’s good so people can actually see firsthand what we’re dealing with.

Irv Halter, a retired two-star numbered Air Force commander who served more than 32 years, called what occurred on Sept. 30 “unprecedented” and rejected some notions, like that of Vice President JD Vance and others, that occurrences like these are not all that unusual.

He referred to the day’s events as a “show” rather than a serious meeting planned clandestinely that included no media attention. Then, Trump got involved “because he can’t pass up a camera,” Halter said.

“You don’t announce to the world, ‘Hey, I’m bringing all the senior leadership from all the services from across the world into one place, and I’m going to spend time with them in front of TV cameras. It’s just crazy,” said Halter, who formerly ran for Congress as a Democrat in Colorado.

Irving and others who spoke to Military.com praised the disposition of service members in attendance, whose quiet patience while in attendance drew attention from onlookers. During his speech, Trump told the generals: “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”

Once upon a time, some in the room worked directly for Irving.

“People from the outside don’t understand. … These are people who have decided to stay in the service for a long time,” he said. “They’re very capable, seasoned leaders. So, this idea that they stick around because they’re afraid about their jobs—they’re not afraid about their jobs. They can make money anywhere.

“They do what they do because they think it’s important and they care. And that’s why they stay in the room, because they still have a service to run or operations to run on behalf of the United States. And they’re the best, capable, best qualified people to do that.”

Wider Implications

Mike Farrell, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran known for his role as Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt on the television series M*A*S*H, described the motives of the Trump administration—be it the meeting at Quantico or potential escalation of a war with Venezuela—as “insane.”

He believes Trump is “mentally ill” and that those behind the scenes, naming White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, are “steering” the country in disputable manners.

“I think we’re in a very new place,” Farrell told Military.com.

The U.S. military is respected internationally and has been for decades not only because of the potential that they maintain, Farrell said, but also because of the fact that they are respectful of relationships and the chain of command.

While he’s glad he didn’t “have to deal with the horrors” of the Vietnam War and disagreed with policy decisions, he said the Constitution requires service members to follow what the Constitution requires.

“When the head of the nation and the people he’s appointed to do the work around and maintain the institutions have become so mindlessly brutal and stupidly self-aggrandizing, it seems to me to be a totally different world that we’re creating, where we’re losing respect around the world,” he said.

Christian Nationalism Within The Ranks

Mikey Weinstein has been fighting against Christian nationalism in the military since Feb. 4, 2004.

The Air Force veteran was born and bred through his own military service. Not only did he serve but so did his father, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, as well as his two sons who are also Air Force Academy graduates. Seven members of his family in total attended the Academy.

More than two decades ago, his focus shifted. That was the same time Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ was released in theaters.

“It was astounding the degree to which the cadet chain of command and officer chain of command at the Air Force Academy was essentially almost making it mandatory for the cadets to go see this movie,” Weinstein told Military.com. “Every meal in Mitchell Hall had a flyer on it, on the plate every meal. You go into the academic building, Fairchild Hall, [and] you couldn’t see the walls—it was plastered with these posters.

“That’s when I began to realize, what the f*** is going on here? I had three of my kids there at the time. This kind of changed my life. My wife and I realized that there’s something wrong here.”

It led to him founding the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a civil rights organization with clients spanning all military branches in addition to officials within the Defense Department and all U.S. national security agencies. MRFF has been nominated myriad times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Weinstein analogizes MRFF’s Christian clientele with the mathematical constant of Pi, in that as the members have grown over two decades the percentage of Christians—hovering around 95%—has also remained consistent.

“We found out that 10 years before the Mel Gibson movie, every Christmas the last edition of the Air Force Academy newspaper had a weekly newspaper that would come out,” he recalled. “The last page of it was filled with the most senior people at the academy and their spouses, making it clear that the only true hope for mankind was our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

“It was signed by scores of members of the faculty and the chain of command, etc. Obviously, these are all unbelievable violations of the separation of church and state. And this is what kind of formed what we were doing.”

That message to separate church and state, especially within the military, has been Weinstein’s calling card for many years. In turn, it’s made him and his family targets for those who have disagreed with his tactics and intent.

He has many firearms in his home. When he and his wife leave the house, they conceal-carry weapons. They have what he describes as “elite-level protection” in the form of canines, bodyguards and infrared cameras, along with close relationships forged with local law enforcement and district attorneys.

The windows of his home have been shot out twice. Animals have been beheaded, disemboweled and left for dead on his property. Beer bottles have been thrown. Swastikas have been painted on his house. Feces has been rubbed on his mailbox.

“I’d never tasted anti-Semitism until my first six months at the Air Force Academy, and then I got it in spades,” said Weinstein, who post-service served as former presidential candidate Ross Perot’s general counsel. “I got beaten twice within a week, unconscious. … A generation later, my kids were going through this stuff.

“We are here to give a voice to these members of the military. If you want to believe in that tree down the road, or Spider-Man, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, as your deity—or no deity, humanism, atheism— that’s fine. But it’s time, place and manner.”

The MRFF, which has some 1,200 workers and representatives on almost every military installation including nuclear submarines and nuclear aircraft carriers, has four foundational principles: to chronicle what is happening, to expose it, to intervene, and to attack when able.

The current scourge of Christian nationalism is being filtered through the government and military, Weinstein and others claim.

One of the service members who spoke to Military.com described themselves as a practicing Roman Catholic who doesn’t fit the present mold of “a dominionist or fundamentalist, a diehard Christian nationalist.” They sought MRFF for help in terms of their own moral quandaries and fears of retribution within the ranks.

“There are well-organized, well-funded organizations in this country who see the military as a mission field,” the senior defense official said. “Having Hegseth in charge of the military is just one piece of that bigger equation of God and country and achieving what Christian nationalists ultimately want to achieve—and dominion, make this a Christian country.”

It’s much worse now than nearly 20 years ago, they added, when MRFF took umbrage with Maj. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., ex-Commandant of Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and six other military officers sanctioning, participating in a promotional video for an evangelical group called Christian Embassy while wearing uniforms.

“But coming from the Secretary of War, that is a whole other level,” they said.

A chaplain endorser from an Evangelical background who spoke anonymously with Military.com currently helps represent typically independent Christian churches and the clergy they produce who desire to be federal or civilian chaplains. That includes 725 current chaplains endorsed, elected and serving.

The endorser, a former Army active-duty and Reserve chaplain, said that their ideology “is very inclusive and that God’s out there and He loves everybody.” Their work tends to align with more independent churches and not a denominational brand, with chaplains freer to administer and have their own philosophies that may not fit with other denominations.

“When I originally went into the Army chaplaincy myself, there was a real spirit of camaraderie whatever that chaplain’s faith was—whether they were Protestant or Jewish or Muslim, Roman Catholic, whatever,” the veteran said. “We all genuinely cared about one another, and we were all there to be helpful to service members.”

That type of openness in ideology today, compared to the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, is missing, said the chaplain. They said things have changed due to politics and personal ideologies, extending even beyond religion to minimize the prospects of potential female chaplains due simply to gender.

“I’m just going to be blunt: the folks that look like me—white, Evangelical, male chaplains and their endorsers—in my opinion increasingly felt empowered. … [The chaplaincy] was originally about to perform or provide for the free exercise of religion for anybody who came to them,” they said.

They continued: “Instead, there’s been a hard right swing—and by right, I mean politically, theologically—that [they]re] there to convert them. … That took on a whole different flavor, a whole different tone, a whole different philosophy/worldview. That’s not turned out well.”

Author’s Note: Mike Farrell, Marty France, Irv Halter and Larry Wilkerson are MRFF Advisory Board members.

Americans’ Role

The National Guard continues its presence across American cities. Citizens and public officials spar with one another over immigration-related activity, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the center. The U.S. has increased aggression against nations like Venezuela without congressional approval.

Those who spoke with Military.com expressed concern about the future of American leadership while expressing optimism regarding the stability of the military and its members—should traditional guardrails hold and individuals of conscience continue to serve.

“If all the good guys leave, there’ll be nothing but bad guys left and gals—maybe not too many gals because Hegseth doesn’t seem to like women too much, either,” Wilkerson said. “My advice—I gave it to Colin Powell for 16 years—is you’re not ordered to do anything unethical or immoral. Stay and make your stay as ethical, moral and constitutional as you can.

“Because if we get nothing in the military or we get a sizable minority even in the military of leaders who will not object to a coup, we will have a coup. There’s no way any state in the world really can be overthrown by a particular leader unless she has the military, the one element with the right to use force, if you will, and armed to the teeth to do so, that is absolutely necessary to a takeover of the government.”

What Farrell finds frightening is that he believes Trump wants to not only please world leaders and adversaries like Russian President Vladimir Putin, but also emulate them and their behavior. That could create the domestic possibility for “terrible damage” to occur without military action but posturing, he said.

“It puts our troops at risk, I think, and it worries me greatly,” Farrell said. “So, I think we are adrift a bit internationally now. The leadership of the Western nations is tolerating, as best they can, the kind of erratic behavior of Trump. But I think they’re significantly perturbed by it, and I think they’re appropriately worried about it. … Who knows who [Trump’s] trying to curry favor with, it could lead to a really terrible result.”

The senior Defense Department official told Military.com that they “have drawn a line” and debated their future within the Defense Department, attributing sticking around to maintaining steady employment and a salary. That, along with a sense of patriotism.

“[I’m] disgusted,” they said. “Where is the outrage on the part of the American people about the way the whole administration is being run? I know that sounds very partisan, but let’s get specific. Do you care at all about how federal workers are being treated? Do you care at all about the talent that’s leaving, in the thousands—people I know and work with that are good, valuable employees.

“I mean, I still care, right?”

The Air Force general shared the sentiment, saying the people in the room at Quantico that fall day “aren’t dumb.” They are well-educated individuals, many with master’s degrees, who understand the challenges ahead.

The general has forged forward with compliments from peers and an understanding that their work and knowledge is meaningful and beneficial to the U.S. military and in turn Americans. It hasn’t been easy, however.

“I would guess that a lot of the people in that room are the same as me,” they said. “Every day it’s a moral dilemma, like, how can I keep serving this organization?

“But if I don’t keep serving this organization, then who’s going to replace me? And who’s going to protect my people who are still here? And who’s going to protect my mission? I think so many people are asking themselves that question every day.”

Some notable, recent service member resignations have included Army Gen. Alvin Holsey, Air Force Chief of Staff David Allvin, and Navy Chief of Staff Jon Harrison.

Wilkerson warns that if individuals who disagree with the current trajectory of the U.S. military and government resign or walk away without attempting to right the proverbial ship, it could just allow the administration’s most sycophantic subscribers to ultimately possess even more power.

Ultimately, it’s up to the people to ensure their country’s success. That could be in the form of vocal denunciation or physical protests, like a massive one with 2 million people that Wilkerson found himself in 2003 in Iraq.

“People should be basically ashamed of themselves that we’ve let our republic get to this state,” Wilkerson said. “But you can say that all day long. People are worried about their next paycheck, about their job, about their kids.

“But ultimately, we’re all responsible for this republic. And when we neglect our responsibilities, things are going to get bad.”

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