Secretary Hegseth administers enlistment oath to 40 recruits at Los Angeles MEPS

Pete Hegseth is a former Army National Guard officer and television commentator who now serves as the U.S. Secretary of War (the position previously known as Secretary of Defense). As secretary, he is the top civilian leader of the Department of War, responsible for providing overall direction, policy, and budget oversight for all U.S. armed forces, advising the president on military matters, and ensuring the military is organized, trained, and equipped to meet national security objectives.

The Department of War is the U.S. federal executive agency that runs the armed forces and provides the military forces needed to deter war and protect national security. It is essentially the modern Department of Defense under a new name: in 2025, President Donald Trump signed an order renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War, while its structure and role as the main U.S. defense organization—overseeing the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force and related defense agencies—remained the same.

The standard U.S. military enlisted oath requires recruits to swear (or affirm) that they will:

• Support and defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic;
• Bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution;
• Obey the orders of the President and the officers appointed over them, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

This is the same basic oath used across all branches when people first enlist.

A Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) is a joint DoD facility where applicants are evaluated and formally processed for enlistment. At MEPS they typically:

• Complete medical exams (physical, vision/hearing tests, lab work);
• Verify or take aptitude tests (ASVAB scores), and sometimes additional job-qualification tests;
• Undergo background screening and brief interviews about legal/medical history;
• Meet with a counselor to review eligible jobs and enlistment options;
• Sign their enlistment contract and, if they decide to proceed, take the oath of enlistment.

The article does not specify which branches these 40 people are entering. At a MEPS ceremony like this, recruits can be headed to any of the active‑duty or reserve components (e.g., Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Coast Guard). The branch is normally determined earlier in the process when each person works with a recruiter, qualifies for specific jobs based on tests and medical screening, and then signs an enlistment contract for a particular branch and job before taking the oath.

Public reporting on this Los Angeles MEPS event describes the 40 people as new “recruits” taking the standard oath of enlistment, with no indication of a draft or compulsory call‑up. Under current U.S. law the military is an all‑volunteer force, and there has been no active draft since 1973, so these 40 were almost certainly volunteers who chose to enlist.