"Could have been an email': Officials balk at Hegseth's generals meeting

The last-minute gathering featured hundreds of senior military officials, who swear an oath to the Constitution, attending something more akin to a campaign rally."

""Not quite a loyalty test, but ... on the spectrum of loyalty to ideology," said a second defense official. "Total waste of money."

"Its a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing," said a former senior defense official.

"It's also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit."