--- title: "Hegseth Orders the Military to Defend the Midterms, Five Weeks Out" description: "The new memo mostly restarts election-protection work the government had been dismantling since 2025" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-09-29T03:15:58.768Z modified: 2026-09-29T05:30:37Z url: https://rews.cc/a/hegseth-orders-the-military-to-defend-the-midterms-five-week-2e5b64 language: en tags: ["elections", "cybersecurity", "military", "trump", "intelligence", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Hegseth Orders the Military to Defend the Midterms, Five Weeks Out *The new memo mostly restarts election-protection work the government had been dismantling since 2025* By Nate Ledger · September 29, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/hegseth-orders-the-military-to-defend-the-midterms-five-week-2e5b64 ## In brief - The Pentagon said Monday that Hegseth signed a memo directing Cyber Command to counter foreign interference in the midterms - The memo largely describes activities the military and spy agencies carried out before Trump’s return to office in 2025 - The administration had disbanded or downsized FBI and ODNI units focused on foreign influence operations - In April, Cyber Command and NSA chief Gen. Joshua Rudd told lawmakers he didn’t know if the Election Security Group had been stood up - Former Cyber Command official Andrew Schoka warned that starting the work now limits its impact before Election Day Here is some news with a slightly odd shape. On Monday, the Pentagon announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has signed a memo directing the US military to defend the upcoming midterm elections from foreign interference. US Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwarfare unit, and the combat support agencies will “deploy advanced intelligence and cyber capabilities” to “identify, disrupt, and neutralize foreign interference in US democratic processes,” the department said in a news release. The memo also directs Cyber Command to work with the Department of Homeland Security against foreign cyber threats to US election infrastructure. Sure. Elections should be defended against foreign hackers; this is a good thing for a defense secretary to want. The odd shape is the calendar. The memo arrives about five weeks before Americans vote in the midterms. Now, a defense secretary’s memo can travel at the speed of email, but the actual work of stopping foreign election interference does not, as we will see. Because here is the thing about what the memo directs: it is largely stuff the US military and spy agencies were already doing to protect elections before Donald Trump returned to the presidency in 2025. Weeks before the 2024 presidential election, for instance, Cyber Command hackers ran a secret operation to disrupt Russian trolls pumping false information at American voters, CNN previously reported. Defending elections from foreign meddling was, until fairly recently, a standing activity. You did not need a memo to start it, because it had already started, years ago. What happened next is that the second Trump administration disbanded or downsized several of the government centers, at the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that were tasked with repelling foreign influence operations. Trump has also continued to dismiss or question past US intelligence conclusions about Russian and Chinese efforts to influence elections. Current and former national security officials grew widely concerned that defending the midterms from foreign meddling simply wasn’t a priority. A memo, five weeks out, is one way to respond to that concern. Announcing the priority is cheaper than rebuilding the institution. The concern peaked in April, when Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, the new head of both Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told lawmakers he didn’t know whether a specialized military and intelligence team dedicated to thwarting foreign threats to elections had even been stood up for the midterms. That team is called the Election Security Group, and its history matters here. Since the 2020 election, the ESG has been the hub where NSA and Cyber Command officials share intelligence and launch counterattacks against trolls from Russia, Iran and elsewhere trying to undermine US elections; it has operated for every general and midterm election since. It exists because Russia’s multipronged influence operation against the 2016 election caught the US intelligence and security agencies flat-footed, and the government decided that being flat-footed was an organizational failure you could fix with an organization. It was not immediately clear what role, if any, the Election Security Group will play in the activity Hegseth has now ordered. Which is a little like announcing you’re going to rebuild the fire department without mentioning whether the fire station is reopening. Rudd himself, in a statement on Monday, said Cyber Command and the NSA “regularly counter actions by malicious foreign cyber actors including those with the intent to interfere with our democratic process.” Note that this is consistent with both readings: they were always doing it, or they have just started doing it. That is the convenient thing about classified work and the inconvenient thing about press releases describing it. > “What concerns me is that \[Rudd\] testified as recently as April that he wasn’t sure if an Election Security Group existed at the command. The ESG’s work takes months of planning and coordination, and a lot of their impact takes place far in advance of Election Day. If that’s just being started now, you’re really limiting the impact that you’re able to have on adversaries before the midterms.” That is Andrew Schoka, who worked at Cyber Command during the 2020 election cycle, talking to CNN, and he is describing the actual mechanism: countering foreign interference is mostly not an Election Day activity. It is the slow accumulation, over months, of knowing which troll farms are warming up which networks and disrupting them before the voters ever see them. A standing group is capital stock. A memo is expense. The rest of the government’s election machinery is busy in its own way: last week the Supreme Court let states go back to using an expanded [Homeland Security tool for hunting noncitizen voters](https://rews.cc/a/america-s-supreme-court-revives-a-federal-tool-for-hunting-n-a5f6e4), one that has also been known to flag citizens. Anyway. Russia, Iran and China presumably do not issue memos announcing when their election-interference efforts begin. Theirs were not signed last week.