On the 5th local time, U.S. Defense Secretary Hegseth said in an interview at the 250th anniversary celebration of the founding of the U.S. Navy that he was aware of the so-called "Pentagon Pizza Index." This is also the first time that the U.S. Secretary of Defense has publicly responded to this private speculation about the U.S. Department of Defense.

Because Americans have the habit of eating pizza as a fast food for overtime, there has long been a website called the "Pentagon Pizza Index" on the Internet. It collects orders from pizza shops near the U.S. Department of Defense to speculate whether the department is working overtime. Forecasting military actions in the United States, this algorithm has attracted the attention of many netizens.

A Fox News reporter in the United States asked Hegseth about this matter on the 5th. Hegseth said that he knew this index. He said, "I had considered ordering a lot of pizza any night, so that everyone could not figure out the situation."

In 1990, the head of Domino's Pizza in Washington, D.C., told the Los Angeles Times that he noticed a sudden increase in pizza orders from the U.S. Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House on August 1 of that year, and the Gulf War broke out the next day. This statement became the original inspiration for the Pizza Index.

However, in June this year, the U.S. Department of Defense denied the accuracy of the "Pizza Index". A Pentagon spokesman said that there were a large number of suppliers in the canteen of the Department of Defense to meet the night dining needs of staff. He also pointed out that the accounts that released data often provided the wrong schedule.