Get excited: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host now installed as President Trump’s generalissimo, is coming to Arkansas tomorrow. He’ll be visiting the L3Harris facility in Camden, the capital of Arkansas’s burgeoning weapons industry.
L3Harris, a Florida-based defense contractor and technology company, manufactures rocket motors at the Camden factory, which employs about 1,500 people. (The plant doesn’t assemble the actual weapons themselves, an L3Harris spokesperson clarified — it just makes the motors and nozzles, the funnel-shaped apparatus at the rear end of a rocket.) Defense giants such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon also have operations in the south Arkansas city.
Last summer, L3Harris announced a $500 million expansion to the Camden plant as part of the Trump administration’s plans to build a missile defense shield known as “Golden Dome” in imitation of Israel’s “Iron Dome” system. The facility was originally owned by Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, which was acquired by L3Harris in 2022.
The Camden stop is part of Hegseth’s nationwide “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, according to a White House press release: “a call to action to revitalize America’s manufacturing might and re-energize the nation’s workforce.” He’s visiting the L3Harris plant in particular because the Department of War — recently renamed because Trump and Hegseth found “Department of Defense” to be insufficiently manly —has just awarded a $1 billion contract to L3Harris to increase production in the coming years.
An L3Harris spokeswoman said high-ranking Arkansas leaders will also be present at Hegseth’s speech Friday but she couldn’t say exactly whom.
Hegseth, a pugilistic conservative committed to restoring a “warrior ethos” to the military, has been one of the most visible figures in the second Trump administration. He’s been the face of the Pentagon’s deadly extrajudicial strikes against boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coast of South America and Central America. He’s orchestrated a purge of military leaders, apparently for insufficient loyalty to Hegseth’s crusade against “woke garbage” in the armed forces.
He’s also been prone to scandal. Once a critic of Hillary Clinton’s handling of sensitive emails, Hegseth in March used the messaging app Signal to communicate with other administration officials about impending U.S. strikes in Yemen, sending specific information about the launch time of aircraft and missiles to a group thread that accidentally included a journalist. He also has a history of alcohol abuse and sexual assault allegations serious enough to cause his own mother to once call him an “abuser of women.” (She’s since defended Hegseth.) Needless to say, he’s among the president’s favorites.