US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said on Fox News on Sunday that he has considered ordering 'lots of pizza on random nights' to confuse people who monitor takeaway activity around the Pentagon for hints of looming military action.
It was a throwaway joke with a slightly sharper edge than it first appears. The so called'Pentagon Pizza Report'has built a following by treating sudden late night spikes at nearby pizzerias as an open source tell that senior officials are working late, watching a crisis, or preparing to move.
The bare bones are these. Hegseth says he knows the account. He says he might order pizza simply to 'throw everybody off.' He argues the Pentagon already plans around the fact that the public can watch patterns like this.
Hegseth was asked about the 'Pentagon Pizza Report', an account on X that trackspizza place activity near the US military headquarters, and he did not pretend he was above the silliness. 'I've thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off,' he said. 'Some Friday night when you see a bunch of Dominos 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.'
The premise, as the account frames it, is simple enough to survive mockery. It watches the 'popular times' data on Google Maps for pizzerias near the Pentagon and other major US military installations. When the numbers jump at unusual hours, the theory goes, it may be because top brass are stuck at their desks, and a global event is either unfolding or about to.
As of 6:59pm ET nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity.pic.twitter.com/ZUfvQ1JBYM
Plenty of people roll their eyes at that and then keep reading anyway. There is a reason. The account has sometimes aligned its posts with real world news in a way that makes coincidence feel uncomfortably tidy.
In the source reporting cited by The Hill, the account pointed to one such moment ahead of Israel's major attack on Iran on 12 June. Around 7pm, it said, activity surged at four pizza places near the Pentagon, a hint that leaders were staying put to monitor what was coming. The account wrote, 'As of 6:59 p.m. ET nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity,' in a post on X.
What makes Hegseth's pizza riff more than a throwaway line is that it lands on a genuine anxiety inside modern defence ministries. The small, harmless looking traces of daily life, map traffic, takeaway orders, even patterns of late night movement, have become the raw material of open source intelligence. It is not classified. It is not stolen. It is simply there, if you know where to look.
Hegseth, for his part, insisted the building is hardly oblivious to the fact that outsiders are watching. 'There's a reason Midnight Hammer worked, because we understood open sourced, we understand classified ways in which the public and others are trying to watch movements and in sensitive ways, we control for a lot that,' he said.
Source: International Business Times UK
