President Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have promised sweeping changes to the U.S. military.

Hegseth has pledged to “rebuild” the military by investing in high-tech weapon and industrial programs while simultaneously cutting costs. The administration has promised to reduce the Department of Defense’s massive spending budget by 8% each year as part of sweeping cuts being undertaken across the federal government.

Those cuts are being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, made up mostly of junior programmers and engineers from Musk’s various companies. On Friday, Musk met with Hegseth and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

While Hegseth supports budget cuts, he specifically requested that the Hawaii-­based U.S. Indo-Pacific Command — which oversees all operations across the Pacific — be exempt from any reductions, a strong sign that Hawaii is being put squarely at the center of the new administration’s military strategy.

“His request that INDO­PACOM be exempted from budget cuts indicates a priority shift from Europe to the Indo­Pacific,” said Elizabeth Freund Larus, adjunct senior fellow at the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum. “It recognizes that China poses the biggest threat to the post-World War II global order. Hegseth’s list of 17 offsets includes funding for military construction funding in the Indo-Pacific to support the military’s Pacific Deterrence Initiative strategic plan.”

Hawaii currently has the highest share of the military’s construction budget of any state, accounting for roughly 8% of the total. The biggest share of those funds — $1.2 billion — is meant for the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard’s Dry Dock 5, which is the single most expensive construction project in Navy history.

The shipyard is the state’s largest industrial employer with a workforce of more than 6,000 employees.

That spending is expected to stay stable amid DOGE’s aggressive federal cuts.

But while military spending has helped prop up Hawaii’s economy, countless dollars also have been spent over the decades on cleaning up pollution associated with the military presence in the islands. In particular, the Red Hill water crisis, which began in 2021 when jet fuel from the Navy’s underground Red Hill storage facility tainted the area’s water system serving 93,000 people, and efforts to shut down the facility has put military operations in Hawaii under the microscope.

Though the Trump administration wants to keep spending to build the nation’s Pacific forces, the future of the military’s environmental cleanup and cultural programs in Hawaii is less clear.

‘A give-and-take thing’

The military has several interests it hopes to maintain in Hawaii. Notably, the Army has several land leases on state lands it uses for training that will expire in 2029. The training areas, acquired for a mere $1 in 1964, have been increasingly used for international exercises, bringing foreign troops from across the globe.

Environmental issues and the future of ancient Hawaiian cultural sites are among the discussions going forward as the Army negotiates lease renewals with the state Board of Land and Natural Resources.

“While we’ve been making gains in building up relationships and trust, trying to have conversations about what this balance looks like between military presence and the community, we are nowhere near even close to getting down to the brass tacks of it all,” said U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawaii, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

“You’ve got a definite change in leadership that’s coming in. It’s really hard to say what they will decide to do, what their posture in Hawaii will be in regards to the lease renegotiations.”

Hegseth has pledged to slash many environmental programs and prohibit military officials from discussing climate change. Even under Trump’s previous administration, the Pentagon studied climate change, including a 2018 study that concluded the majority of U.S. bases faced threats from intensifying weather patterns.

“Some segments of our society can consider climate change to be either nonexistent or just a matter to be kind of thrown away from a political perspective,” said U.S. Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii. “But the military has studied the consequences of changes in our weather, on their preparation, on their installations, on their ability to fight wars, on their basic ability to function, and they’ve reached a very definite, objective conclusion — absent of politics — that the kind of climate changes we’re seeing in the world are detrimental, if left unaddressed, to their mission.”

Larus said Hegseth has been critical “of ideological training in the U.S. military, including workshops and education modules outside the war-fighting domain, such as on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and those on climate change.” Last month he fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. CQ Brown Jr., who was formerly the top Air Force commander in the Pacific, and several other top officers the administration deemed as “woke.”

The military has spent millions on environmental remediation and on preserving ancient Hawaiian cultural sites on lands it controls and uses for its operations in Hawaii. When asked if the Pentagon under Hegseth would actively pursue promised environmental cleanup and cultural preservation programs specific to Hawaii under the new administration, Larus said Hegseth “is single-minded when it comes to the U.S. military. He has said over and over that the mission of the U.S. military is warfighting.”

Larus said Hawaii residents should expect to see environmental and cultural programs drastically scaled back and argued most were the result of congressional mandates that “warped military priorities and distracted the military from warfighting with an emphasis on lethality. Recognizing that U.S. adversaries, such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, have no such desire to make the military a kinder and gentler organization, Hegseth and President Trump want to return the U.S. military to a fighting force that is more lethal than that of its adversaries.”

But state Sen. Kurt Fevella, who has represented portions of the Ewa area since 2018 as one of Hawaii’s few Republican lawmakers, said that talk of cutting back on environmental efforts troubles him.

“I know they got to be ready, not taking away anything from there, but there’s parameters … ,” he said. “The disrespect for the host people is something that is troubling for me.”

Fevella has already tangled with military officials under both the Trump and Biden administrations when it comes to environmental and community concerns around the Marine Corps’ Puuloa Range Training Facility in his district, pollution coming out of Pearl Harbor and Army land leases, including the large Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii island. He said he remains committed to those fights in the long term.

“We want to be able to protect our environment when it comes to any kind of military presence. To be a good partner is a give-and-take thing,” Fevella said. “Do they have a cleaning plan for Pearl Harbor? Do they have any plan to clean up all the oil that is leaking into the ocean that’s coming to my community at Puuloa Beach Park? No, they don’t address these things. So to be a good neighbor to the host community — or host people — just do your job. They have the the best engineers … (so) why you cannot just be pono to the land?”

Warfighters

China has been proactively building up its military capabilities and clashing with neighboring countries. In particular, the Chinese military has sought to impose control over the South China Sea — a critical waterway that more than a third of all international trade travels through — over the objections of its neighbors, often clashing with vessels from those countries.

It has also stepped up military maneuvers around Taiwan, a self-ruled island democracy with close U.S. trade ties that Beijing regards as a rogue province.

“Threats across the region from North Korea, China and Russia are real and stretch from illicit to strategic dangers,” according to Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The Chinese in particular have engaged in nefarious influence campaigns from pressuring local island governments to enabling criminal organizations to operate in the region, weakening local governance.”

The U.S. military has conducted constant patrols and training exercises throughout the region. Larus argued “the Biden administration was strong on diplomacy with Pacific allies as well as with projection of soft power but was weak on military power and military power projection; (it) was weak on backing up diplomacy with military strength.”

China now has the world’s largest navy in terms of number of ships and is growing its capacity, while the U.S. is struggling to maintain ships at its aging shipyards.

“The biggest mistake that previous administrations made in the Pacific is failing to maintain a navy adequate to sustain U.S. maritime power in the region and to uphold the peace and security of the Indo-Pacific,” Larus said. “U.S. Navy assets are inadequate to deter China’s muscular and growing navy. In particular, the U.S. has lost its ability to keep up with China’s shipbuilding capacity.”

Military leaders have expressed optimism about Hegseth’s pledge to streamline the acquisition of new military hardware and trim the bureaucracy. On Feb. 13 at the Honolulu Defense Forum, INDOPACOM chief Adm. Samuel Paparo said the U.S. military needs “procurement at the speed of combat, not at the speed of committees … Technology alone is not going to win this fight. We’ve also got to reform defense bureaucracy with unprecedented urgency.”

But several military officials who spoke to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser also expressed unease about the administration’s apparent dismissal of climate change, which many Pacific countries see as their No. 1 threat, its contentious dealings with traditional allies and an aggressive push to gut any programs deemed to promote DEI.

When it comes to diversity, some military officials said they are concerned about an over-correction of the Biden administration’s embrace of identity politics toward outright rejection of efforts to capitalize on America’s cultural diversity.

An Army official noted that Hawaii serves as both a key military and diplomatic meeting site for the U.S. government in part because its diverse Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora populations vividly demonstrate America’s deep Pacific ties — something U.S. officials have proudly highlighted to their Pacific allies in the past.

Under Trump’s first presidency and the Biden years, there was a push to recruit young Hawaii residents to serve as military officers and diplomats and in intelligence roles to support America’s “pivot to the Pacific.”

“Anything that says the word ‘cultural’ — even ‘historical’ — is looking to be removed from the Department of Defense,” Tokuda said.

She noted that she and other lawmakers have fought for cultural training for military personnel coming to Hawaii and the Pacific, arguing “it’s so critically important they understand the history of where we have been as a people, as a community, in regards to our relationship with the military, so they better understand how we must do better going forward.”

Recently, the Pentagon drew immense backlash in Hawaii when it removed digital content about Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the service. Among the culled content was an Army webpage dedicated to the legendary 442nd Regimental Combat team, which was drawn largely from Hawaii-born Nisei and became one of the most decorated combat units in American history.

Fierce public response led to the swift republishing of the Army’s 442nd history as a news item on its website, but much of the rest of the content remains unavailable. Pentagon officials have insisted they intend to honor veterans but say they now want to remove race and culture from the discussion as much as possible.

“Anybody that claims to know exactly how this is all going to unfold is on a fool’s errand,” Case said. “I’m eyes wide open that, if nothing else, we’re dealing with a very fluid and uncertain situation where a new administration could make changes with dramatic ripple effects around our region and, in fact, the world.

“And so I don’t think any of us can predict with any degree of certainty what President Trump will do, either generally or specific to the DOD, or what the consequences of what he does will be either.”