The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, jokingly remarked that the recent surge in takeout orders from pizza shops near the Pentagon might not necessarily indicate any significant military action about to take place, but rather could be him deliberately ordering pizza just to “confuse everyone.”
During an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Hegseth acknowledged the Twitter account “Pentagon Pizza Report,” which tracks the activity of pizza shops near the U.S. military center on the social media platform X. He mentioned having considered the idea of placing bulk pizza orders on random nights just to throw people off. “Perhaps on a random Friday night when you see a bunch of Domino’s orders coming in, that could just be me messing around on the app, disrupting the whole system so that we keep everyone guessing. We’re watching every indicator,” he said.
The “Pentagon Pizza Report” analyzes data on Google Maps tracking the activity of pizza shops near the Pentagon and other major military facilities during “peak hours” to speculate whether any major geopolitical events are imminent. Their viewpoint is that when these pizza shops experience a sudden increase in activity in the evening or late at night, it indicates that senior officials at the Pentagon (formerly known as the Department of Defense) are working longer hours, often hinting at potential military actions happening or about to occur globally.
An illustrative example is from June 12, 2025, when hours before news broke of Israel launching a major attack on Iran, the “Pentagon Pizza Report” noticed a significant spike in the activity of four pizza shops near the Pentagon on Google Maps around 7 p.m. This was seen as a signal that U.S. military leaders were staying put to closely monitor developments.
Hegseth emphasized on Sunday that defense officials are well aware of such publicly available information. “This is also why the ‘Midnight Hammer’ mission has been successful because we are very aware of some public information, and we know that the public and others are trying to monitor military trends in sensitive ways — we have multiple controls in place for this,” he explained.
The Twitter account for the “Pentagon Pizza Report” was created in August 2024, although the practice of tracking military dynamics through pizza delivery situations has been around since the 1980s. The phenomenon of tracking in real-time through applications has emerged in recent years with the rapid development of the internet.
(Adapted from a report by “Congress Hill News”)