Isn't it gross what Fox does? It's just so gross. Here's why it's gross. Think about what they did in Iraq. Think of what they did in Iraq, the cheerleading, and then they abandoned it.

Then when they don't get the ratings, when it starts to be a quagmire, they just kind of walk away from it. Every now and again, they would show American troops, but they walked away from it.

Just gross people, horrible people.

Lindsey Graham, the people in South Carolina—I just don't know how you put up with the man.

He's just a sick individual. "Make Iran Great Again." We don't care about Iran, and we don't care about making Iran great again.

The Persians are in the streets. They're going to make it great again. It's in their hands. Let them deal with it. They brought it on, the Islamic Republic. You want to cleanse it? You got to cleanse it yourself.

Can't do it with outside forces. Can't do it with Israel. If you do Israel and the United States in there, you're just going to prolong the problem.

I want to tell you a little bit about the purpose of SpaceX: we want to make Star Trek real. We want to make Starfleet Academy real so that it’s not always science fiction—but one day, the science fiction turn into science fact.

We have spaceships—big spaceships—going through space, with people going to other planets, going to the Moon, and ultimately going beyond our star system to other star systems, where we may meet aliens or discover long-dead alien civilizations.

I don’t know—but we want to go, and we want to see what’s happening. We want to have epic, futuristic spaceships with lots of people in them, traveling to places we’ve never been to before.

Hegseth: How about this? *Vulcan salute* Star Trek real.

Elon: Star Trek real, Yes!

Very soon, we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department — long overdue.

To further that, today at my direction, we're executing an AI acceleration strategy that will extend our lead in military AI established during President Trump's first term.

This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future.

In short, we will win this race by becoming an AI-first warfighting force across all domains, from the back offices of the Pentagon to the tactical edge on the front lines.

In modern warfare, the fastest innovator and iterator will be the winner.

No one can out-innovate an American entrepreneur who has been liberated from the constraints of stifling bureaucracy.

That old era ends today: we are done running a peacetime science fair while our potential adversaries are running a wartime arms race.

President Trump's AI executive order spells out our approach succinctly.

It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance in defense of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the War Department's mission.

We must ensure America's military AI dominance so that no adversary can exploit that same technology to hold our national security interests or our citizens at risk — America First in every domain.

Since the end of the Cold War, the defense industrial base in our country has consolidated.

This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for new creators of technical innovations to win business at our department.

The result is a risk-averse culture that prevents us from providing our warfighters with the best resources that America has to offer — that ends today!

We need to be blunt here. We can no longer afford to wait a decade for our legacy prime contractors to deliver the next perfect system, only to find that it's delivered years behind schedule and costs 10 times what it should.

Winning requires a new playbook.

Elon wrote it with his algorithm. Question every requirement, delete the dumb ones, and accelerate like hell.

I want to make clear across the War Department and for our partners in the private sector that our Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, Emile Michael right here in the front row, is the War Department's single chief technology officer, one CTO for the entire enterprise — Novel concept.

As the sole CTO, Emile will set the technical direction and lead the innovation ecosystem that will welcome progress from anywhere it resides. And he'll tell me face-to-face every day and frankly whether we are gaining or losing the technology and innovation competition.

He'll have the decision authority and will lead through rigorous evaluation with a focus on real, measurable outcomes. By affirming the Undersecretary's role as the department's CTO, we're carrying out the core mission for research and experimentation that Congress assigned in statute.

You see, this isn't about military structure.

This is about building an innovation pipeline that cuts through the overgrown bureaucratic underbrush and clears away the debris Elon-style, preferably with a chainsaw, and to do so at speed and urgency that meets the moment.