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... There was no reason for this address to be broadcast at all. It could have been delivered privately, quietly, effectively -- a briefing on ethos without turning generals into props. That it was televised in full, exclusively on Fox News, transformed a professional reset into a spectacle.

Every scripted pause, every line of praise, every exhortation to applause reinforced allegiance -- to Hegseth and Trump personally, rather than to the institution or the Constitution. "Warrior ethos" became a coded invocation: courage reframed as devotion to a figure, discipline as obedience to a show, and service as a tool for political theater.

Yet in that room, the silence of the generals and admirals was remarkable. Even as Trump awkwardly encouraged them to clap for a partisan pep talk, they didn't. Their restraint was deliberate, almost performative in its own right: a quiet, principled refusal to be reduced to props -- or agitprops to be exact -- in a loyalty pageant.

In a media landscape obsessed with optics, their silence communicated more than any applause line could. ...