Imagine you're a senior US military officer - and then this

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• The top US military brass met in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30 to hold a war council.
• "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth criticizes the state of the armed forces and invokes a new "warrior ethos".
• If you want to keep your beard, are too fat or don't keep up, you're out.
• Donald Trump wants to revive the outdated battleship concept and finds stealth ships unnecessarily ugly.
• Trump is calling for the military to be deployed domestically because it is a good tradition.

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Imagine you're a real bigwig in the US military - and you get this message that all generals and admirals have to gather in Quantico in the US state of Virginia on September 30.

So you postpone your appointments for the time being. If you are far away, you have to quickly organize the trip, which of course requires you to take your entire staff with you. A video conference is obviously not an option, which is probably why Uncle Sam is spending millions to make the meeting possible.

It must be a particularly hot topic to justify this expense. And now you're sitting in this room with hundreds of colleagues. Nobody knows exactly what it will be about.

So imagine you're one of these important military officers, and then ...

"Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth calls for a "warrior ethos" to be lived from the top: "We have a sacred duty to ensure that our warriors are led by the most capable and qualified combat leaders."

But you're probably not one of them: "For far too long, we have not. The military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things. In many ways, this speech is about fixing decades of decay," Hegseth says.

Hegseth: "This administration, from day one, has done a lot to remove social justice, political correctness and the toxic ideological garbage that had infected our ministry and to rip out those policies."

The 45-year-old bans "identity month, DEI offices, guys in dresses, climate change worship, division, distraction and gender delusion." "No more debris," says Hegseth - and you can guess how the artillery officer winced at that moment. "I've said it before and I'll say it again: we're done with this sh****."

Hegseth: "Frankly, it's tiring to look at combat troops - or any formation - and see fat troops. Likewise, it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon. It looks bad. It's bad, and it's not who we are."

Maybe, as a bigwig, you're cursing all those working lunches with foreign military attachés right now and canceling a few meetings to steel yourself instead. Maybe you're wondering instead whether all football coaches have to be thin and fit to do a good job.

"We will promote high-performing officers and non-commissioned officers more quickly and get rid of those with poor performance more quickly," Hegseth announces. "The same reforms were already in place before the Second World War."

The time of old generals like the dismissed Mark Milley or military legends like Norman Schwarzkopf and George Patton is over: "There will be more leadership changes, I'm sure of it, not because we want to, but because we have to," promises the former Fox News presenter. If you don't go along, you're out.

Imagine you're still jet-lagged from your last-minute flight from Guam in the Pacific - and then your president tells you all these things you've heard a million times before.

Everything was so great in his first term - the economy, the military, everything was great! Then four years under Joe Biden. "I'll never forget that," says Trump. And the renaming! The War Department. The Gulf of America. The judge who ruled in his favor.

And the war. Sometimes you have to wage it, Trump knows. And he can end them too. Seven of them - or all at once? "In war, you never know what's going to happen," says the 79-year-old. And the war in Ukraine would never have happened with him.

As a bigwig in the military, you of course know that we live in an age of drones and missiles, that they are a challenge for modern armed forces either because of their large numbers or because of their high speed. Your commander-in-chief, however, is on a very different tack.

"That's something we're looking at, the battleship concept," Trump says. "Six-inch thick, solid steel. Not aluminum that melts when it sees a missile coming at it. It starts melting." He has loved battleships since the movie "Victory at Sea": "Nothing could stop them," he enthuses.

What Trump doesn't like is the look of modern ships with stealth features: "I'm a very aesthetic person. Some of the ships you build I don't like aesthetically. They say it's stealth. But it's not stealth. An ugly ship is not necessary to say you're stealthy."

"It's the enemy within, and we have to take care of it before it gets out of control": Trump surprises the military with the announcement that he wants to use it to combat unrest against demonstrators.

This is a tradition: settlers used to be protected, "outlaws and bandits" were hunted down in the Wild West. "Our history is full of military heroes who have taken on all enemies - abroad and at home."

Deployment on the home front is even the military's first priority: "There is an invasion at home," says Trump. The enemy is also even harder to spot: "If they were at least wearing a uniform, you could take them out."

"I've ordered one or two submarines - I won't say anything about the second one - to Russia's coast - just to be careful," says Trump. So far, only the deployment of one submarine was known, but the Commander-in-Chief is not talking about the second one either.

We must not allow that word to be used, says the New Yorker, referring to Russia. "I call it the N-word. There are two N-words, and you can't use either of them. And frankly, if [nuclear weapons] are used, we have more than anyone else. We have better ones, we have newer ones."

"I've never walked into a room so quiet," Trump says. "Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, applaud."

As a bigwig in the US military, you of course know that you and your colleagues are obliged to remain neutral and that it is not appropriate to applaud. The President obviously doesn't know that. After all, booing is a thing of the past.