LOS ANGELES, California — War Secretary Pete Hegseth visited aerospace, defense, and weapons manufacturers as part of his ongoing “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, where he emphasized the Pentagon’s push to support smaller technology contractors and thanked the engineers for their work.
Breitbart News was granted exclusive access to the Southern California leg of Hegseth’s tour on Thursday and Friday as he toured Divergent Technologies, Castelion, and Rocket Lab.
After Hegseth’s first stop at the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in Los Angeles, where he performed a swearing-in ceremony for 40 new recruits, he then went to the nearby suburb of Torrance, where Divergent uses revolutionary 3D printing technology to build supercars, and now components of weapons.
Speaking to the company’s employees on Thursday evening, Hegseth thanked them and said he intends to win the “war of attrition” within the bureaucracy at the Pentagon in order to get better technology.
“Our job is to motivate you to keep going, to say that we need you as patriots of this nation, to keep pushing that envelope, to give our warfighters what they need in that next fight,” the war secretary said. “Our adversaries are watching what we do right now. If we’re too bloated and too slow and too wedded to the past, then we’re going to lose.
“And all I know is America doesn’t lose,” he added, garnering a round of applause.
Divergent CEO Lukas Czinger thanked Hegseth for visiting, writing on LinkedIn that his company is “proud to stand alongside those building the Arsenal of Freedom!”
On Friday, after completing an early morning workout with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Hegseth took his tour to Castelion, a defense technology startup led by former SpaceX engineers.
Speaking with Breitbart News, Castelion cofounder Andrew Kreitz talked about the contracts his company was awarded last year for its Blackbeard weapon system, revealing that the first units are expected to be delivered in 2027.
Blackbeard is the firm’s first long-range hypersonic strike weapon and is designed for mass production, he said.
According to Kreitz, the main “threat” to the United States “is the Chinese Communist Party.”
Hegseth delivered a similar motivational speech to the engineers at Castelion, saying “the point of this tour is to look all of you in the eye, and tell you that what you are doing is just as important” as the military’s work.
The secretary continued on to say that he wants to “rip” apart bureaucracy at the Pentagon so that “companies like this one can compete on your merits” for defense contracts, which was met with applause.
Lastly, Hegseth visited Rocket Lab in Long Beach, which caught plenty of attention on social media from stockholders.
Speaking with Rocket Lab’s engineers, he told the 200-some-member team that they “are the engine of the new Arsenal of Freedom” for the U.S. to “project its will anywhere, anytime without question.”
In December, the U.S. Space Force awarded the company a $805 million contract to develop 18 defense satellites meant to detect enemy missiles in low Earth orbit, the Long Beach Post reported.
At the end of Hegseth’s remarks, a brief “USA!” chant broke out among the employees.
The Arsenal of Freedom tour, which continued this week in Texas with visits to Lockheed Martin and SpaceX, comes as Trump called for the military budget to be increased to $1.5 trillion in 2027.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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