The US defense secretary has also unveiled major changes, including a new drone command and an Elon Musk-led task force to assess the future of warfare.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that the United States military has slashed the number of its generals and admirals by 20%.

He made the announcement while addressing junior officers and enlisted leaders at the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia during what he called his "State of the Force" address.

"The number-crunchers say we fired 10% of the generals and admirals across the force," Hegseth said, adding: "We've also reduced the overall number of general officer slots by an additional 10%."

"So yes, 20% reduction across the board," he noted. "The media calls that a purge. I call it accountability, and long overdue."

Cutting the fat or a purge?
The address came a year after a similar speech to top officers in which Hegseth said the US military was too fat, too focused on leftist "woke" ideas, and in need of major shake-up.

Since the start of Donald Trump's second term as president early last year, a number of top military personnel have been forced out of their positions.

Trump, for instance, fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles "CQ" Brown, without explanation in February 2025.

Other senior officers pushed out include the heads of the US Army, Navy and Coast Guard, the general who headed the National Security Agency, the vice chief of staff of the US Air Force, and a Navy admiral assigned to NATO.

Hegseth has insisted the president is simply choosing the military leaders he wants.

But Democratic lawmakers have raised concerns about the potential politicization of the US military.

Some members of Congress have called the latest cuts to the general ranks a "purge" that will take years to rebuild.

"He's got some kind of like deep-seated grievance about leadership in the military,” Democratic Senator Mark Kelly told the Associated Press. Kelly is a former Navy combat pilot who has been critical of Hegseth. "He's purging a generation of great leaders of the military, and it's going to take a generation to recover from it."

Republican Senator Mike Rounds, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he wanted to understand Hegseth's reasoning.

"If it's simply a matter of eliminating a very heavy top, there may be some validity to it, but I want to see it first," Rounds said.

What Hegseth said about the new command
On Wednesday, Hegseth also announced his intention to create a new drone-focused warfare command, which would oversee the rollout of autonomous and robotic capabilities.

He said that "the pace of war is changing faster than the process to support it."

The defense secretary pointed to Ukraine's use of drones to combat Russian forces to underscore how warfare and battlefield tactics are changing.

"Ukraine's lesson is not that one type of drone wins wars, but rather the need for a purpose-built system that maximizes the ability to adapt," Hegseth said.

To study the future of warfare, the secretary unveiled a task force led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Anduril Industries.

He said the work "will be focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes."

The Pentagon chief pointed to the need to dominate "any future battlefield, from under the Earth to beyond the moon."