In 2021, the U.S. Army put out a recruitment video featuring a young woman named Emma who boasted about her “two moms” and her sorority-girl status. You probably remember it. At the time, the video went a bit viral. This, it seemed, was the goal of our military for a new age: Satisfy the demands of woke ideology, regardless of the impacts it might have on our troops’ abilities to protect our country.
We’re now watching that era come to an abrupt end.
On Tuesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called together top military brass and, in a televised address, informed them — among other things — that unhealthy BMIs and beards were no longer considered acceptable. Why? “Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops.” (READ MORE: Real Leadership in the Unsung Men of the Armed Forces)
The military, Hegseth informed these generals, will return to the gender-neutral physical fitness standards of the 1990s. If soldiers, regardless of whether they serve in the field or at a desk, can’t meet those standards, they’re out. “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in [a] combat unit with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” Hegseth told them.
Predictably, that announcement ruffled the feathers of liberal writers and commentators in the media.
Sunny Hostin, a commentator on the View, complained that she wasn’t quite sure how Hegseth’s assertion that troops needed to get in shape was “an uplifting message.” After all, that statement suggests that — disturbingly — the military isn’t making body positivity a priority.
If you ask Zeeshan Aleem, an opinion writer and editor at MSNBC, Hegseth’s whole speech was “insulting,” not to mention downright “radical.” It was insulting because, even though the secretary of war assured the generals gathered at Quantico that they were “the best of America,” he also perhaps implied that some of them were promoted “based on their race, based on gender quotas, [and] based on historic so-called ‘firsts.’” It was radical because, evidently, it revealed that Hegseth’s aim is to turn the military into “a swashbuckling corps of bloodthirsty MAGA warriors.”
Meanwhile, Tom Nichols at the Atlantic criticized Donald Trump’s follow-up speech for its rambling, political-stump-speech-esque nature (granted, it probably won’t make it into the top 25 best speeches ever given by a president) and complained that it showcased his “obsession with former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.” It does not seem to have occurred to Nichols that the message of the event — that our military is woefully unprepared and needs to remedy that fact — is a rather important one.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation’s Index of U.S. Military Strength found that the Army had just 62 percent of the force it needed to be considered combat-ready and, from a technological perspective, was “aging faster than it is modernizing.” The Navy was projected to have just 280 of the 400 ships it will need to meet operational demands in 2037, and the Air Force was struggling to both retain pilots and train those it did have.
While it’s true that the U.S. military remains the strongest force in the world, it hasn’t been on track to remain that way. There has been an overwhelming recruitment issue. The U.S. Army met its goals in 2024 by reducing its target by more than 10,000 — after having missed previous targets by 25 percent — and the Navy just barely managed to fill out its ranks in the same year by lowering fitness standards. (READ MORE: Real Military Reform Begins)
Those who are in the armed forces seem, from a medical standpoint, unprepared for hard combat. In 2023, a study conducted by the American Security Project found that nearly 70 percent of the U.S. armed forces were either overweight or obese.
We could, of course, get in the weeds about what qualifies as “overweight,” “obese,” and “out of shape.” A reasonable person could certainly come to the conclusion that men in the field should be held to a higher physical fitness standard than those assigned desk jobs. All things considered, it’s probably not severely affecting our military’s readiness that some soldiers look like “Nordic pagans.”
But, making all those arguments would overlook the larger point Hegseth is making: When we’re trying to achieve global peace by projecting strength to our enemies, appearances are critical. The fact is, filling combat formations with pudgy, unkempt soldiers just isn’t a good look.
Does having a fit fighting force increase the number of ships in the Navy’s arsenal? Of course not. Hegseth knows that. But if he can fill the military’s ranks with the kinds of men and women who are disciplined enough to do tough physical training on a daily basis, he’ll have a military that’s disciplined enough to figure out what to do about it.
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