On his first official visit to Rhode Island Monday morning to celebrate and inspire workers at America’s shipyards and defense manufacturing facilities, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth kept about 250 of them standing around waiting for him.
Hegseth was over 45 minutes late for a scheduled 10:15 a.m. tour of Anduril Industries’ Quonset Point factory, the third stop on his morning visit to the North Kingstown port and business park after first swearing in 40 new military recruits at the Seabees Museum and then speaking to a crowd of 3,000 employees at General Dynamic Electric Boat’s manufacturing hub. His motorcade took him past a crowd of about 100 protestors at the entrance to the memorial park that is home to the museum honoring the U.S. Navy’s elite construction battalion.
Hegseth’s visit to Electric Boat’s facility for building outer hulls and interiors for nuclear-powered submarines was closed to the press because it was in a classified area, Myra Lee, spokesperson for General Dynamics Electric Boat, said. He arrived at Electric Boat at around 9:30 a.m.
“He was originally only supposed to spend 45 minutes — he spent a lot longer speaking with our employees and crew members that were there,” Lee said in a phone interview. “He was late to everything after that.”
Electric Boat’s hub is two miles away from Anduril, a manufacturer of unmanned submarines, where the press was allowed inside to wait in a designated area on the factory floor while employees were talking among themselves. Silence fell over the crowd when Hegseth and a wall of security officials finally arrived at 11:07 a.m. for a 25-minute tour, followed by a nearly eight-minute speech.
His morning visit to Rhode Island before heading to Maine’s Bath Iron Works in the afternoon was part of his nationwide “Arsenal of Freedom” campaign highlighting the defense industry’s “manufacturing might” and the need to cut red tape.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order last April to bolster the shipbuilding industry, which faces a critical shortage of skilled workers, aging infrastructure, and limited capacity to meet U.S. Navy demand. America’s shipyards would need to substantially ramp up production in order to build another 100 or so battle force ships over the next three decades, particularly for nuclear-powered submarines, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan.
Trump on Jan. 7 signed an executive order that blocks “underperforming” defense contractors from paying dividends or buying back stock until “they are able to produce a superior product, on time and on budget.”
Hegseth told Anduril’s workers that production is “too tethered to an existing pipeline that has become too slow.”
“We don’t get what we need when we need it,” Hegseth said, before invoking the new name for the federal government’s largest agency. “I can assure you inside this War Department, we’re committed to ensuring the best of the best can run as fast as possible.”
No members of Rhode Island’s Congressional delegation were present for Hegseth’s stop in the Ocean State.
Rhode Island’s U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had been invited to join Hegseth but declined because of a previously scheduled 10 a.m. engagement in Woonsocket. He joined fellow Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Gov. Dan McKee and other officials for a ribbon cutting at Millrace, a 70-unit affordable housing development with 23,000 square feet of commercial and community space in a renovated three historic mill complex. Reed had secured over $1 million in federal funds to expand affordable housing in downtown Woonsocket.
Reed, who voted against Hegseth’s appointment to lead the Pentagon last year, citing his lack of experience and past conduct, saw the secretary’s Rhode Island visit as a positive development.
“I hope the secretary comes away from this visit with a keen appreciation for the skill, dedication, and innovation of our talented defense workers and an understanding of the need to invest in our Submarine Industrial Base shipbuilders, shipyards, and critical suppliers,” he said in a statement.
Hegseth appeared to be impressed as he saw the various stages of development of Anduril’s Dive-LD autonomous submarines, which can be used for seabed mapping, establishing communications relays, and infrastructure inspection.
The California-headquartered company landed an $18.6 million U.S. Navy contract in 2024 to prototype distributed, long-range, persistent underwater sensing and payload delivery in contested environments.
“You’re on the frontlines of ensuring we stay ahead,” Hegseth said. “And every day we stay ahead is a day that we deter conflict.”
Hegseth is the third Trump cabinet head to visit Rhode Island after Secretary of Education Linda McMahon toured Exeter-West Greenwich Regional Junior High and High School last month and Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez DeRemer stopped at a Cranston fire station last August.
Hegseth commended employees for showing up on the heels of the New England Patriots’ Super Bowl 60 loss to the Seattle Seahawks.
“I hear there was a game on Sunday, but we won’t talk about that,” Hegseth told the crowd. “Thanks for showing up on Monday for work. That shows you’re motivated.”
After Hegseth finished his remarks, he walked off to “Got to Hurry” by the Yardbirds as it played over the factory’s speakers.
Rhode Island ‘unwelcomes’ Hegseth
The temperature outside was about 14 degrees. But the cold couldn’t keep away at least 100 protesters lining the north side of Gate Road, flanking the entrance to the Seabees Memorial Park where the Seabees Museum is located. Some passing cars honked at the protesters in the cold, which seemed to warm their spirits, eliciting clapping and cheers.
“If Minnesota can do it, so can we,” Lucy Christie of East Greenwich said in an interview about 10 minutes before Hegseth’s motorcade passed by. She held a brown cardboard sign reading “HEALTH CARE NOT WARFARE.”
“We were so upset and embarrassed about the war crimes committed by the Department of Defense and we just needed to take this opportunity to bring that up to Hegseth and his entourage,” she added.
Her husband George Christie stood next to her holding a U.S. Marine Corps flag. George said he thought Hegseth promotes “his false and fake machismo as a veteran” with little appreciation for history.
“I respect the fact that he was in the service,” George Christie said. “I don’t respect the lessons he learned while he was in the service. I don’t respect the person he works for. I believe what he needs to understand if he reads his history that it was Athens that eliminated the Persian threat, not Sparta.
“His business of degrading scouting because it tries to upgrade the lives of women and gay people is violently offensive to anybody that actually fought for this country or cared for this country, for all the people of this country, and he doesn’t and that needs to be changed.”
Dubbed “Rhode Island ‘Unwelcomes’ Hegseth,” the protest was organized by West Bay Blue Wave. Carol Schimmelpfennig of Brooklyn, Connecticut, who is in her mid-70s, said the cold couldn’t keep her away.
“Think about what these people are doing to this country, and this is how we have to show our support to come out in the cold,” Schimmelpfennig said.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
