Ship captain who traveled with Pete Hegseth here.
When we toured the nation’s next supercarrier together and sat down to lunch with the crew, every eye in the room tracked Pete.
It wasn’t electric. It wasn’t rhetoric. It was reciprocity.
Everyone from the seaman recruits to the three-star admiral was locked in, because he wasn’t self-conscious, wasn’t buried in his notes, wasn’t reading off a script. Every person in the room felt seen and heard, even the ones who never said a word.
Most journalists take copious notes. I soak in details and run simulations.
Or maybe that’s not the journalist in me. It’s the ship captain.
We were standing in a cavernous hangar bay and I was already running a flooding scenario. What if the ship heeled hard and water poured into the compartment?
I was working it fast: watertight integrity, tie-down points, where the water would pool, where the escape routes were.
Then a hand landed on my shoulder.
Pete. He pulled me back into the room, and we talked briefly.
The guy is watching everything.
And not just inside his inner sanctum of four-star GOFOs and PhD advisors like Elbridge Colby.
He has rare situational awareness for what the warfighter actually needs. And he’s reading X too.
I can’t tell you how often something posted on X with real consequence gets clocked by Pete and processed inside his office.
The guy has his head on a swivel.
Dakota Meyer@Dakota_Meyer
This is what it looks like to have a warfighter in a room full of politicians…. Never get them confused. Proud to call @SecWar a friend and even more proud to serve under him.
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