Now our warriors can know if you're up for promotion, the best person's going to be selected for the job based on merit.

It's not going to be on the color of your skin or on your gender.

Hey, everybody. I am Alad Eliahu, the White House correspondent here at Timcast.

But today we have a very exciting different episode for you because we are at the Pentagon's Media Row where we are doing interviews with different Pentagon officials. Today we have Department of War Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson here with us today. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this meteor row. Since we're a little bit trained on time, I kind of wanted to just jump right into it. Absolutely. One of the first things I wanted to ask you about is one of the new initiatives here was changing the name from Department of Defense to Department of War. I actually heard the slip up in yesterday's

because of regarding that. What should we understand from the name change here? I think it's really

important. Your name speaks to what you do and who you are, right? And here at the department,

we've been focused, I i think under previous administrations

republican and democrat on endless defense endless nation building um and we're really at the end

of the day getting back to our core mission of war fighting um of lethality of basics right our warriors

sign up not because they want to you know do nation building across the world but because they want to be lethal they want to be war fighters they want to, you know, do nation building across the world, but because they want to be lethal. They want to be war fighters. They want to defend the American people wherever they can. So our name really now communicates that. It communicates strength. And President Trump is the Peace Through Strength President, right? He doesn't seek war. We don't seek war at this department. We hope to never have to engage in war, but we're going to be prepared for it. And we're going to make sure that our warriors are prepared for it. So our name speaks to that now. And I think it communicates something that defense really never could. So we're very excited about that change. We've been changing a lot of the plaques around the building and making sure that everything's up to date. And I think it really has been emblematic of the culture shift we have seen under Secretary

Hegseth.

Now our warfighters aren't focusing on DEI, climate change, drag queen story times, on Navy

ships.

Now they're focused on getting back to basics, being fit, lethality, having weapons that

work and are strong. So all of that's going to continue to be a priority for us going forward. Absolutely. And to follow up on one of the things that you mentioned, as I understand, Secretary of War, Pete Hexstaff, has been rolling back the different DEI initiatives that were here at the Department of War. Can you describe some of the initiatives and tell me why is this an important thing for

him to be working on? Yeah, so much of our military, unfortunately, under the previous administration,

had this ideology injected into the force. And that's a real shame, because our political

ideologies shouldn't be in our armed forces, right? We've got Americans of all stripes and

colors, and we want to make sure that everyone is unified. Our unity is our strength, as the Secretary always says, not our diversity. We all wear the same uniform, right? If you're in the military, you all have the same mission, and we're committed to that going forward. And we've dismantled a lot of the ridiculous DEI-focused promotions that we had in the previous administration. The previous

administration, they would promote someone if they met a quota, right? If they were the right

race or if they were the right sex. We're getting rid of all of that. Thanks to President

Trump's executive order in large part, we've been able to make that a permanent reality here.

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