WASHINGTON — Strategic ambiguity, now available by the slice.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has suggested he will surge pizza orders to the Pentagon to throw eagle-eyed observers who use the deliveries to predict US military action off the scent.
A popular X account, the “Pentagon Pizza Report,” has been using open-source data to track pizza activity near the US military’s headquarters to predict when a major geopolitical event is about to unfold.
“I’m aware of that account,” Hegseth told his former Fox News colleague Peter Doocy in an interview that aired on “The Sunday Briefing.”
“I haven’t thought of just going to the cafeteria, I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off,” he added.
“Some Friday night, when you see a bunch of Domino’s orders, it might just be me on an app, throwing the whole system off so we keep everybody off balance. We look at every indicator.”
Hegseth is a well-known acolyte of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again efforts, having once complained that “it is unacceptable to see fat generals” and instituted tougher fitness requirements.
Early on the morning of Jan. 3, the Pentagon Pizza Report flagged a dramatic surge in late-night activity from Pizzato Pizza in Arlington, Va., just a five-minute drive from the five-sided building.
Around that same time, members of the US Army’s elite Delta Force were carrying out Operation Absolute Resolve to capture Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
Critical details of that operation had already leaked to multiple news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, but both declined to publish that information in advnace due to concerns about the safety of American troops.
Since launching in 2024, the Pentagon Pizza Report has also surges in pie activity that haven’t coincided with known major military operations.
The account tracks data from Google Maps to gauge surges in business at pie joints around the Pentagon and other critical military hubs.
On June 12, 2025, the account went viral for flagging a spike in orders near the Pentagon right around the time that Israel launched its 12-day war against Iran. Nine days later, the US carried out its own strikes on three of the Tehran regime’s key nuclear sites.
“Trust me, we look at every indicator. There’s a reason Operation Midnight Hammer worked. Because we understood open source. We understood ways in which the public and others are trying to watch movements,” Hegseth told Doocy.
“In sensitive ways, we control for a lot of that in ways that only the US government can. There’s only one military that can do what we can do, which is why it’s such a solemn responsibility for me to make sure the leaders this military has are leaders they deserve.”
Public fascination with the national security establishment’s pizza consumption dates back decades, with local Domino’s franchisee Frank Meeks making national news in 1990 when he told the Los Angeles Times that 21 pies had been delivered to the CIA the night before Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, triggering the Persian Gulf War.
