> Sure, but if they weren’t in use, why mention them?

Errr, Hegseth is a functioning alcoholic recently parachuted into a job several orders of magnitude past anything in his prior experience.

He's likely to blurt out anything unredacted that he's heard in briefings without any due consideration of consequence.

That aside, these are training missions, they have night vision available, this would have been flagged as one of many possible influencing factors in the absence of a full accident investigation that crawls through everything.

It's unknown (to the public at least, and at this point no one who knows would or should say) whether they were in use for now.

As defrost said, having goggles would be normal (probably even required by local unit policy) for any night flight. Whether they are helpful or harmful will vary with conditions so, yeah, when transiting through a dense urban area with lots of ambient light you might actually flip them up (i.e. out of the way, above your line of sight) to see better.

Also as defrost said, nobody can know right now if they were actually in-use at the time of the incident. We have to wait for cockpit voice recordings.

Anyway, it's not really significant, though. I think Secretary Hegseth mentioned it because a portion of the public will equate "flying with night vision" to "flying in daylight" (even though it's not even close), so the DoD was taking all appropriate measures to be safe. Or he was just told that the crew was doing a "goggle reset" flight (because crew members need to log at least one hour of flight time with goggles every 60 days to stay current), and he jumped to a conclusion.