HONOLULU | Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived in Hawaii on Monday for intelligence briefings and meetings with senior military officials at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command with a heavy emphasis on the threat posed by China.
Mr. Hegseth arrived aboard an Air Force E-4 nuclear command post aircraft for his first visit to the region. He is scheduled to visit the Philippines and Japan later this week.
“The Indo-Pacific Command is shifting priorities to make sure we are deterring threats in the future. President Trump’s been focused on that,” he said.
“Re-establishing the warrior ethos, rebuilding our military, and ultimately, re-establishing deterrence is critically important, and so we’re out here to talk to our commanders, and, more importantly, meet with the troops all across the Indo-Pacific, and then our allies and partners,” he said.
He said close cooperation with regional allies is critical to ensuring the Indo-Pacific region’s freedom and openness.
Mr. Hegseth was greeted by Adm. Sam Paparo, commander of the Hawaii-based command.
Adm. Paparo has sounded the alarm about increasingly aggressive Chinese military activities around Taiwan.
The four-star admiral has said the large-scale Chinese military operations are not exercises but rehearsals for an invasion.
Asked about a report that a journalist was sent text messages about the attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen, Mr. Hegseth criticized the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist.”
“I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops,” he told reporters.
“I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning, and you see, we’ve been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration. Our troops, our sailors were getting shot at as targets. Our ships couldn’t sail through and when they did shoot back purely defensively, or at shacks in Yemen,” Mr. Hegseth said.
“President Trump said, No more. We will re-establish deterrence. We will open freedom of navigation, and we will ultimately decimate the Houthis, which is exactly what we’re doing as we speak, from the beginning, overwhelmingly.”
Asked whether he shared details on the Signal app, Mr. Hegseth said: “Nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say about it.”
