Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he is “aware” of a social media account claiming to track a connection between pizza orders from restaurants around the Pentagon and U.S. military operations, and suggested the Department of Defense could intentionally order in to confuse the tracker.
Why It Matters
An X account with more than 250,000 followers under the name Pentagon Pizza Report posts Google-sourced updates on how busy the pizza restaurants in proximity to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, report to be at certain times. A site called the Pentagon Pizza Index says it uses publicly available data to track multiple pizza locations around the Defense Department headquarters, updating the information roughly every 10 minutes.
A theory that has circulated since the 1980s suggests that the surge in pizza orders could indicate that government personnel are working late at the Pentagon, potentially on upcoming operations—although it is met with skepticism by some experts. The Pentagon Pizza Index says it “digitizes this folk intelligence into a modern OSINT [open-source intelligence] tool.”
What To Know
“I’m aware of that account,” Hegseth told Fox News’s Peter Doocy on Sunday. “I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off.”
“Next time there’s going to be an airstrike, have you guys thought about maybe just going to the cafeteria?” Doocy said, before Hegseth responded that he had not.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Defense via email for comment.
Hegseth then referenced the June U.S. military strikes against several Iranian nuclear sites, saying the attacks “worked, because we understood open-source, we understood classified ways in which the public and others would try to watch movements.”
More than 125 U.S. aircraft were involved in Operation Midnight Hammer, which targeted three Iranian sites critical to Tehran’s nuclear program.
Earlier in June, the Israeli military launched attacks on Iran that kicked off what became known as the 12-day war between the two countries. The Pentagon Pizza Report posted on X that shortly before 7 p.m. ET on June 12, “nearly all pizza establishments nearby the Pentagon have experienced a HUGE surge in activity.”
Reports of explosions in Iran emerged at around 3:30 a.m. local time on Friday.
A Pentagon spokesperson told Newsweek in June that the timeline outlined in the Pentagon Pizza Report does “not align with the events,” adding, “There are many pizza options available inside the Pentagon, also sushi, sandwiches, donuts, coffee, etc.”
What People Are Saying
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, on Fox News: “Some Friday night, when you see a bunch of Domino’s orders, it might be just me on an app, throwing the whole system off.”
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer reportedly said in 1990: “Bottom line for journalists—always monitor the pizzas.”