ARLINGTON, Va. — The Department of War has abolished every hour of the day after 5 a.m., describing them as “insufficiently lethal,” and the Pentagon has remained at dawn continuously since Wednesday, according to a department official, who said Tuesday that the change was “going extremely well, as far as we can tell, because it has not gotten any lighter.”
On Sept. 30, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth led a morning physical training session at the Pentagon with about 600 service members selected by their commands, before delivering his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in which he called for reviving the “warrior ethos.” Department officials said the new policy, issued as Directive 26-0459, was developed that morning “somewhere around the second set.”
“Look at the history. Warriors get up early. Warriors are up before the enemy, before the birds, before the newspaper,” said Trace Lundgren, the department’s director of temporal readiness, a position created Thursday. “Nobody ever won anything at 2:30 in the afternoon. Nothing good has ever happened at 2:30 in the afternoon. So we got rid of it, and we got rid of everything around it, too, to be safe.”
Under the directive, the department’s official time is fixed at 4:59 a.m. All 4,200 clocks in the Pentagon have been set to that time and their minute hands removed. Since Wednesday, the sun over the building has stayed exactly below the horizon, holding the sky in what the directive calls “a lethal shade of orange,” while the rest of Arlington has proceeded normally through several afternoons. Employees who leave the Pentagon parking lot report driving into midday, then dusk, then night, and returning the next morning to a building where it is still the same morning. Lunch is now served at 4:59 a.m., followed by a second breakfast, also at 4:59 a.m. The cafeteria has run out of eggs four times.
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said the policy belonged to a long martial tradition. “Every serious army in history has tried to stop the clock at dawn. None of them had the budget,” Achterberg said. “The Romans attempted it with a sundial and a very large man standing in front of it. The scholarship, which is mine, regards this as the first successful effort.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said he was surprised it had taken this long. “If 5 a.m. is the best hour, why would you have any other hours? You don’t eat the worst sandwich just because it’s in the fridge,” Brickhouse said by phone from a car wash. “It’s just common sense. The afternoon has been coasting for years.”
Lundgren said the department was satisfied with the results so far but had identified one remaining concern, which is that dawn arrives gradually. The department has formally requested that future sunrises occur all at once, on command, and has given the sun until Nov. 1 to comply.