Some troops have gone a year without hot water. Others are sleeping in their cars to escape barracks without air conditioning. And some are asking for little more than drywall, spackle and paint so they can make repairs themselves.
Those are among the conditions Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer says he has encountered while touring military installations on a mission from War Secretary Pete Hegseth: Fix a barracks system plagued by decades of neglect.
“I would tell you that there’s only a couple that I’ve seen that are good,” Meyer told Fox News Digital in an interview Thursday.
Meyer, who serves as senior adviser to the Pentagon’s Barracks Task Force, has visited more than eight installations across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps since taking on the assignment and plans to visit 30 before the end of the year.
“What I thought was gonna be a professional job very quickly turned into personal,” Meyer said.
DAKOTA MEYER TALKS SERVICE, BLASTS CONTROVERSIAL DESIGN FOR GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR MEMORIAL
At one installation, Meyer recalled asking a 19-year-old service member what she would change about her living conditions if she could “wave a magic wand.”
“If she could just have a hot shower,” Meyer recalled. “It’s absolutely heartbreaking.”
The Pentagon’s barracks problems long predate Hegseth and have survived repeated attempts at reform.Â
A sweeping 2023 Government Accountability Office investigation documented serious health and safety hazards and found that the department lacked reliable information about the condition of its own barracks, could not determine how much of its facilities spending went toward them and provided insufficient oversight.
Congress and the military services have since committed billions toward improvements, including initiatives ranging from the Marine Corps’ “Barracks 2030” to a Navy overhaul of unaccompanied housing. Yet serious problems persist. As of this year, 12 of GAO’s 31 recommendations remained outstanding.
Hegseth has sought to centralize the effort under a department-wide task force and accelerate improvements, with Meyer saying the secretary has made clear that identifying problems is no longer enough.
“The secretary has made it clear to me he doesn’t expect me to observe this, study it, or to make it better. He expects me to fix it,” Meyer said. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Meyer, the only Medal of Honor hero to reenlist after receiving the award, said one of his first requests was for Hegseth to give the task force an “authoritative role,” rather than simply create another layer of oversight.
The goal, he said, was to give the team the ability “to go out and make decisions, to be able to have impact, to be able to make change, and to be able to direct where that funding goes and how fast it gets to our service members.”
EXCLUSIVE: HEGSETH TO DOUBLE CUTS TO GENERALS, ADMIRALS IN MAJOR PENTAGON SHAKEUP
Meyer argued the problem is not simply a lack of money. Funding shortfalls, continuing resolutions and years of deferred maintenance have all contributed, he said, but so have layers of contracting rules and bureaucracy that can slow even relatively basic repairs.
A separate w
