Sunny Hostin and her co-hosts on The View blasted Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s call for stricter military fitness standards, accusing him of “fat-shaming” troops and delivering what Hostin called “not an uplifting message.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth touted the new name, the Department of War, saying "the era of the Department of Defense is over."

Senior officers, summoned from around the world, are entrusted to manage complex military operations. They got a lecture on fitness and grooming standards.

Rothkopf said the summit is exactly what he would expect from a former Fox News host turned defense secretary. Hegseth served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army National Guard from 2003 to 2021, with deployments to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan, before rising to fame as a co-host of Fox & Friends in 2017.

After listing the proposed changes, Hegseth gave the assembled officers a warning: “If the words I’m speaking today are making your hearts sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.” If the commanders wanted to better understand what he was saying, he jokingly told them, they could pick up a copy of his book.

Before a captive audience of hundreds of senior military officers on Tuesday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserted his vision for how the US military will physically look and act, and offered a stark conclusion: If you don’t agree,

From where I sit, you don’t win trust by lecturing warfighters; until Pete Hegseth owns his gaps, listens hard, and speaks candidly with the President and the flag officers, he’ll keep driving the people he must persuade into polite,