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It is a strange country that needs to be told its army should look like an army. Yet here we are, convened at Quantico, where the newly styled Secretary of War told 800 generals what any corporal used to know. A military that forgets its purpose becomes a pageant of management consultants in camouflage. The speech said: No more pageant. One could almost hear the clerks of the Ministry of Approved Opinions drop their clipboards and fire off an HR complaint.

The optics were operatic. Dragging flag officers from far-flung commands for what could have been a memo carried a whiff of emperors summoning the Senate to admire their new laurels. Hegseth helicoptered in beneath a hangar-size flag, the title Secretary of War resurrected from 1947 like a defiant relic of seriousness. Eight hundred flag officers sat in disciplined silence, not dissent but the stillness of men who’ve learned that applause can be career-limiting.

The line was unmistakable: Reform or resign. He read out a roll call of reputations: “Out with the Chiarellis and the Milleys; in with the Schwarzkopfs and the Pattons.” A swap of LinkedIn for Guadalcanal. He promised a return to the “highest male standard” for combat arms, a reversion to the “1990 test”: If a standard was lowered after 1990, explain why war demanded it or admit that HR did. For his critics this was reactionary nostalgia. For those who’ve watched the Pentagon’s waistline expand while its readiness contracts, it sounded suspiciously like common sense.

“The purpose of the armed forces is not to reflect the population but to protect it.”

The New York Times dismissed it as “macho posturing,” while The Independent fretted that Hegseth’s directives would “make it harder for women to serve in combat and easier for personnel to engage in hazing.” The Guardian’s Moira Donegan warned of “a dangerous attempt to turn the military into a partisan tool of the regime.” To her, silence in that room was condemnation. But generals are not cable news pundits. They do not clap on cue, and they do not boo. They listen, they take the temperature, and they adjust accordingly. That, incidentally, is how bureaucracies survive changes of regime.

Critics scoffed at the ban on beards and the full-throated attack on tubbiness, as if grooming standards were a monarchic whim. They forget that armies are machines of habit, drilled into bodies long before ideas. When the drill collapses, the doctrine soon follows. If you cannot make the run, you will not make the rendezvous. It is not gallantry to pretend otherwise. It is negligence. The slogan, resurrected from a saner age, was peace through strength. Peace through spreadsheets has been tried, and the invoice arrived in Kabul.

Hegseth went further. The Pentagon’s definitions of “toxic leadership,” “bullying,” and “hazing” would be reviewed. Anonymous complaints would end. “No more walking on eggshells,” he said. Commanders would again be free to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing. The outrage was immediate. Commentators saw a license to bully; Hegseth saw the opposite—the restoration of authority disciplined by competence. Real abuse should be charged and punished, not laundered through HR anonymity. Standards don’t enable cruelty; they starve it of its favorite alibi: chaos.

The partisans of decline insist that talk of merit, fitness, and lethality masks a darker intent. They hear dog whistles in the order of the day. They spy an agenda to purge, to narrow, to masculinize. Perhaps they’re right, though not in the way they think. Armies have always advertised cultural style. The Prussians looked like Prussians, the Spartans like Spartans. The problem is that ours too often looks like a DEI workshop in camouflage.

One might add that Hegseth’s reforms, bold as they were, stopped short of the deeper heresy: asking whether women belong in combat at all. On that point, I would have gone further. The time has come for an adult conversation about what equality really means in a profession built on lethality, not inclusion. For two decades America has fought counterinsurgency wars that spared it Somme-like casualties. That luxury has concealed hard truths.

A century ago, Britain, France, and Germany lost whole generations of young men in the meat grinder of the Western Front. That war left demographic craters that never quite got filled—missing sons and fathers, warped marriage patterns, lost births, and social consequences that rippled well into the next century. Civilizations survive their defeats, but not always their demographics. The current war in Ukraine is a canary in the coal mine, warning that industrial-scale slaughter has returned. A major-power war today would not resemble Afghanistan or Iraq. It would resemble 1916 with drones.

It is not in the national interest of any civilized state, unless facing extinction, to feed its daughters into that furnace in the name of equality.

As the historian Martin van Creveld has long argued, war is not an equal-opportunity employer. Armies exist to kill efficiently, not to vindicate social theory. The data have never been ambiguous. The 1992 Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces found that the average female recruit possessed barely half the upper-body strength of her male counterpart and suffered stress fractures up to five times as often. In naval tests, over 90 percent of women failed basic damage-control tasks men passed with ease. These are not moral judgments but physical facts. Biology does not yield to ideology, and policy cannot repeal physics.

Yet the bureaucracy pretends. It pretends that “gender integration” at Ranger School was organic, though insiders admitted the outcome was fixed before the first push-up. It pretends that “empathy training” and pregnancy simulators make better soldiers. It pretends that lowering standards to meet spreadsheets does not lower readiness. It is performance art in camouflage—an army built to impress editorial boards rather than deter enemies.

Van Creveld noted that when a society sends women to war, it is not because it is strong but because it has forgotten what strength is for. That forgetfulness has become policy. The purpose of the armed forces is not to reflect the population but to protect it. Confusing those two imperatives is how civilizations end, not with invasion but with self-parody.

The dissenters prefer to make this a morality play. Donegan reached for the specter of 1930s Berlin; others muttered about caudillos and slippery slopes. But Quantico was not Weimar’s last rites, nor a loyalty oath to a man. It was a reprimand to a bureaucracy that spent the past two decades pretending war could be made kind by administrative decree, and to a military establishment that, by slow bureaucratic osmosis, had begun to resemble the armed wing of the Democratic Party. The long march of leftist ideology through America’s institutions did not stop at the Pentagon gates, and this too has to be reversed. The Pentagon learned to speak fluent NGO, to confuse moral fashion with moral virtue, and to mistake political neutrality for cowardice. Quantico was an overdue reminder that armies are not supposed to mirror a ruling ideology; they are supposed to defend the republic that allows ideologies to compete.

The room’s frostiness, so diligently reported, proves less than advertised. Generals are realists in ribbons. Many dislike being told what they already know. Many resent being summoned across oceans for a sermon on standards. They are not wrong about the cost or the optics. Yet the deeper insult is the one America has tolerated for years: a force spread thin, drilled into therapeutic rituals, and subjected to a quiet loyalty test in which dissenters were eased to the exits—all while being asked to pretend that lethal purpose is a therapy project.

The speech, for all its provocations, ended that pretense. Soldiers fight wars. The rest is decor. One might wish for gentler words, fewer barbs, more magnanimity toward those who served under different directives. One might flinch at the showman flourishes. But sympathy does not require servility, and admiration does not demand amnesia.

Yet the core is defensible, even necessary. The republic has enemies abroad and disorder at home. It cannot meet either with a military whose chief virtue is photogenic inclusivity. Rome had better roads, but it also had legions. The roads were not what kept the Goths at bay.

So take Quantico as an imperfect correction, a signal that the age of curated decline is, at least rhetorically, over. Standards will do what slogans never can. They will select. They will exclude. They will produce a smaller, sharper force, which is what you want on the worst night of your life. The bureaucrats will howl. The op-ed pages will rend garments and then bill for the outrage. The troops, the ones who run and ruck and shoot, will feel something older than outrage. They will feel seen.

If that is all the day accomplished, it was not nothing. For one morning in Virginia, the PowerPoints blinked off, the room stood at attention, and the republic remembered that armies are not HR departments with rifles. That is not fascism. It is sanity. And in a civilization this far into its dotage, sanity sounds revolutionary.