Hegseth to chair Pentagon’s new homeland defense panel

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will now oversee a new Pentagon advisory committee focused on homeland security and defense — the first such department panel to do so.

The Homeland Defense Board (HDB), announced in the Federal Register on Sept. 11 and first reported by Defense News , is meant to fill what the Pentagon sees as a gap in the “specific, integrated advice” the Defense secretary needs to defend the homeland, which “is not available from any other Federal advisory committee, government agency, or alternative source,” according to the panel’s establishing documents.

“Over the past 10 years, rather than lessening, the threat from peer, near-peer, and rogue-state adversaries, in addition to non-state actors and hostile asymmetric activities, has become more intense and complex,” the justifying documents state.

As adversaries are actively projecting economic, cyber and military power into the Western Hemisphere, the new board will provide “critical, independent assessments” of the Defense Department’s “hemispheric defensive posture and domestic security preparedness.”

The documents argue that because other agencies and departments operate within specific mission or geographic areas, they are constrained or unsuited in advising on certain military issues.

The Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council, for example, “focuses exclusively on civilian law enforcement, border management, and emergency response” and “lacks the mandate to advise on Title 10 or Title 32 [domestic troop] deployments” and military-specific crises responses.

And the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board’s focus on diplomacy and arms control makes it “unequipped” to evaluate military campaign plans or defense strategies in North and South America.

The documents continue to state that relying solely on internal Defense Department “staff or contracted studies is also insufficient, as it fails to provide the consensus-based, independent, and external peer review required at the highest levels of strategic decision-making.”

The documents add that without the HDB, the Defense Department “risks strategic blind spots in its primary mission to protect the Homeland.”

The new board follows Hegseth’s purge of all members of existing Pentagon advisory panels in March 2025 after he ordered a 45-day “zero-based review” to determine if the roughly 40 such committees were aligned with the Trump administration’s policy priorities.

Completed in May the same year, the review proposed cutting 14 different defense advisory groups including the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, which was first established in 1951. Hegseth accused the committee of “ advancing a divisive feminist agenda ,” before terminating it.

According to the establishing documents, the HDB will be made up of 20 members “who are eminent authorities” in the fields of homeland defense, military strategy, defense support of civil authorities, interagency integration, critical infrastructure and cybersecurity, strategic competition, and western hemisphere policy.

The members will include Hegseth as chair; the Defense Department’s assistant secretary for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs as vice chair; and one Pentagon civilian officer and one field-grade or mid-grade officer from each military department, among others.

The new board comes amid an ongoing military campaign at the U.S.-Mexico border; strikes on suspected drug carrying boats around Central and South America; and a large-scale deployment of the National Guard to U.S. cities, including more than 3,000 troops in Washington, D.C., in support of law enforcement.

There also are growing fears that President Trump could deploy federalized National Guard troops around polling locations ahead of the November midterm elections or seek to use the military to influence elections, even as federal laws prevent such action, NPR reported last week .