Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is on Oahu to meet with Pacific military leaders to discuss China and other security priorities in the region.

It’s part of a Pacific tour that will include stops in Guam, Japan and the Philippines in his first visit to the region in his role as Pentagon chief.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command did not respond to questions about Hegseth’s visit, but photos released by the military on social media showed that soon after touching down on Oahu, he went to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command headquarters at Camp Smith, where he met with INDO­PACOM chief Adm. Samuel Paparo and other members of the military’s senior leadership in the Pacific, the Pentagon’s top-priority theater of operations.

In a statement released Friday, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Hegseth will meet with American and allied forces and that in Japan he will participate in a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima. Parnell said, “Secretary Hegseth’s trip comes as the United States builds on unprecedented cooperation with like-minded countries to strengthen regional security.”

The U.S. military is preparing for Exercise Balikatan in the Philippines, a large exercise in which Philippine, American, Australian and Japanese militaries will train to repel a simulated ocean invasion. The Hawaii-based 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment and Army 25th Infantry Division are set to participate.

The exercise will focus on the western portions of the archipelago facing the South China Sea — where real-world tensions have boiled.

China considers the critical waterway — which more than a third of all international trade travels through — to be its exclusive sovereign territory over the objections of the Philippines and other countries that border it. China has seized several disputed islands and reefs and attacked fishermen and other maritime workers from the Philippines and other neighboring countries.

Hegseth has pledged to scale back U.S. military operations in Europe and the Middle East to focus on competing with China in the Pacific. He also pledged to “rebuild” the American military with a focus on obtaining new weapons, investing in the defense industry and building up forces — while simultaneously cutting Pentagon spending.

The Trump administration has promised to reduce the Department of Defense’s budget by 8% each year as part of sweeping cuts being undertaken across the federal government. But while Hegseth supports budget cuts, he specifically requested that the Hawaii-­based U.S. Indo-Pacific Command — which oversees all operations across the Pacific — be exempt from any reductions.

During his congressional confirmation hearing, Hegseth said that “we’re going to reestablish deterrence. First and foremost, we will defend our homeland, our borders and our skies. Second, we will work with our partners and allies to deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific from the Communist Chinese. And finally, we will responsibly end wars to ensure that we prioritize our resources to reorient to larger threats.”

Hawaii is the nerve center for all U.S. military operations in the region, and troops from other countries in the region have increasingly come to the islands to train with American forces.

Hawaii has the highest share of the military’s construction budget of any state, accounting for roughly 8% of the total. That includes $1.2 billion for Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard’s Dry Dock 5, a dock to service new nuclear submarines and the most expensive construction project in Navy history. Hegseth has promised to cut Pentagon bureaucracy to more quickly acquire new weapons, equipment and munitions to maximize the military’s “lethality.”

Many military leaders, including Paparo, have welcomed the pledge.

In November, Paparo told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., that American munitions used to shoot down missiles and drones from Iranian-backed militants in the Middle East, and munitions sent to Ukrainian forces to help them fight back against invading Russian forces, threatened stocks of available weapons to potentially fight China in a Pacific conflict, saying, “It’s now eating into stocks, and to say otherwise would be dishonest.”

In February, Paparo told attendees at the Honolulu Defense Forum, “Our magazines run low, our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month for every critical joint force element — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force, Coast Guard. Critical air, missile, maritime, space platforms age faster than we can replace them perfectly, and we operate on increasingly thin margins of error. Our opponents see these gaps, and they are moving aggressively to exploit them.”

While the military plays a central role in Hawaii’s economy, bringing in an estimated $8.8 billion and making up 8.9% of the gross domestic product, its footprint in the islands has drawn scrutiny. Millions of dollars also have been spent on cleaning up environmental contamination associated with the military presence in the islands.

That includes the ongoing effort to shut down the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility, which in 2021 leaked jet fuel into the service’s Oahu water system, which serves 93,000 people including service members and their families and civilians living in former military areas. Thousands reported suffering serious rashes, digestive problems and other symptoms.

The Navy is now working to shut down the facility, which sits just 100 feet about the aquifer most of Oahu relies on for drinking water.

The military also seeks to renew leases on several state-owned lands that were leased to the Army in 1964 for $1, which the U.S. and allied militaries have been using to train together.

The state wants the military to agree to continue environmental protection and remediation programs on those lands, as well as preservation of ancient Native Hawaiian sites. Recent congressional legislation requires the military to actively combat invasive species on lands it controls in Hawaii, including the coconut rhinoceros beetle, which has been ravaging palm trees across Hawaii.

Hegseth, for his part, has said he intends to scale back environmental and cultural programs, which he has derided as wasting time and money. Hegseth, who served as an infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, has argued most of these programs have distracted the military from focusing on acquiring weapons and training for combat operations. It’s not yet clear whether the Pentagon’s new leadership might push for military environmental cleanup and protection programs in Hawaii to be downsized or eliminated.

Hegseth touched down on Oahu shortly after controversy emerged when The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published an article Opens in a new tab Monday describing how he had been inadvertently added to a group chat on the messaging app Signal by White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz that discussed plans for military operations against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Goldberg reported that Hegseth shared sensitive intelligence about operations.

Goldberg also wrote that the chat also apparently included accounts belonging to Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and other senior National Security Council officials. The article included several screenshots from the chat log.

After landing on Oahu, Hegseth told reporters traveling with him that “nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.” He also accused Goldbery of being “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profesiion of peddling hoaxes.”

In a statement, National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said that “the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”

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