United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth jokingly said that he could make random pizza orders to confuse a social media profile that tries to anticipate military operations by the movement in pizzerias near the Pentagon.
The statement was given to Fox News, when he was asked about the “Pentagon Pizza Report”, an account on X (formerly Twitter) that monitors peak times in stores in the region.
Hegseth stated that he knows the profile and suggested that he could “mess up the system” with multiple requests on specific nights to disorient those who follow these signals.
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“Some Friday night, when you see a bunch of Domino’s orders, it could just be me on the app, throwing everyone off track. We look at all kinds of indicators,” he said.
The “Pentagon Pizza Report” uses public data from Google Maps to monitor sudden increases in movement at pizzerias near strategic bases, based on the idea that nighttime spikes indicate authorities working late.
In June last year, the account recorded a spike in activity near the Pentagon hours before a major Israeli attack on Iran was made public.
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Washington denies participation in this specific attack, but the US took action later, in the “Midnight Hammer” operation, which bombed Iranian nuclear facilities.
Hegseth cited the episode to reinforce that the Pentagon monitors both open data and classified information and tries to limit the way in which this type of signal can expose military movements to external observers.
