Modern military communications equipment makes it rather easy for the Pentagon to interact with personnel stationed anywhere on the planet, a fact that made it all the more unusual when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent a curious invitation to U.S. military leaders abroad. The Washington Post reported:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered hundreds of the U.S. military’s generals and admirals to gather on short notice — and without a stated reason — at a Marine Corps base in Virginia next week, sowing confusion and alarm after the Trump administration’s firing of numerous senior leaders this year. The highly unusual directive was sent to virtually all of the military’s top commanders worldwide, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.

According to the Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC, the beleaguered Pentagon chief and former Fox News host issued the directive earlier this week — and no one outside of Hegseth’s office seems to know why.

The scope of the order is striking. “There are about 800 generals and admirals spread across the United States and dozens of other countries and time zones,” the Post added. “Hegseth’s order, people familiar with the matter said, applies to all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, or their Navy equivalent, serving in command positions and their top enlisted advisers. Typically, each of these officers oversees hundreds or thousands of rank-and-file troops.”

One U.S. official told the newspaper, “Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now? All of it is weird.”

It’s also quite unsettling. As Rachel Maddow noted via Bluesky, “Imagine the response if a Dem Administration removed every top general and admiral from every US military post all around the world (including conflict zones), in order to force them to attend a big in-person meeting in DC (with a former cable news co-host).”

Making matters just a bit worse, the White House is acting as if this were somehow routine.

“It’s great when generals and top people want to come to the United States to be with a now-called secretary of war,” Donald Trump told reporters, seemingly unaware of the fact that the generals and admirals didn’t request the opportunity but, rather, were ordered to attend on short notice for reasons unknown.

Around the same time, JD Vance added, “It’s actually not unusual at all.”

As is too often the case, the gap between the vice president’s rhetoric and reality was enormous. The aforementioned report added, “None of the people who spoke with The Post could recall a defense secretary ever ordering so many of the military’s generals and admirals to assemble like this. Several said it raised security concerns.”

The point about security concerns is of particular interest, since it’s an open question whether foreign adversaries or non-state actors might try to exploit the fact that every U.S. general and admiral on the planet is suddenly leaving their posts at the same time.

“It will make the commands just diminished if something pops up,” one defense official told the Post.

The president nevertheless asked reporters, “Isn’t it nice that people are coming from all over the world to be with us?” But that made it sound as if U.S. generals and admirals are tourists, eager for a trip to the nation’s capital because they want to hang out with Trump.

Reality appears to tell a very different kind of story.