The United States Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, joked that he could place random pizza orders to confuse a social media profile that attempts to anticipate military operations by monitoring movements at pizza places near the Pentagon.
The remark was made to Fox News when he was questioned about the “Pentagon Pizza Report,” an X (formerly Twitter) account that tracks peak times at stores in the region.
Hegseth said he knows the profile and suggested that he could “mess with the system” by placing several orders on specific nights to disorient those who monitor these signals.
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“Some Friday night, when you see a bunch of Domino’s orders, it might just be me in the app, throwing everyone off balance. We look at all kinds of indicators,” he said.
The “Pentagon Pizza Report” uses public Google Maps data to monitor sudden increases in movement at pizzerias near strategic bases, based on the idea that late-night spikes indicate authorities working late.
In June of last year, the account recorded a surge in activity near the Pentagon hours before a major Israeli attack on Iran was made public.
Washington denied involvement in that specific attack, but the U.S. moved afterward in the operation “Hammer of Midnight,” which bombed Iranian nuclear facilities.
Hegseth cited the episode to reinforce that the Pentagon monitors both open-source data and classified information and tries to limit how such signals can expose military movements to external observers.
