Save this story Save Story Save this story In his fiery “State of the Force” address last month at Marine Corps Base Quantico, America’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth laid out his exacting standards for troops today: “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals.” To drive home his point, the Pentagon had arranged for the troops in the audience to perfectly resemble Hegseth’s vision, promulgating specific waist-to-height requirements and “impeccable" grooming standards.
There were, however, three VIPs in the balcony who deviated substantially from Hegseth’s criteria: Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk , and Newt Gingrich, the odd trio entrusted to co-direct “Project Meridian," a new task force focused on the achievement of “absolute technological superiority” across the Pentagon.
Their remit, and collective appearance, imbued Hegseth's performance with an ironic tension. After all, according to Hegseth’s own framework, Luckey is a beardo, Musk is a weirdo, and Gingrich, for his part, is no powerlifter. More substantially, though, their mission calls to mind a future that exclusively relies on nerds and robots to wage warfare. AI, in other words, is coming for the commandos.
Hegseth’s enduring commitment to old-school masculine tropes seems at once a cynical gambit to recruit strapping young men into an institution for which physical strength might become increasingly irrelevant, and an illustration of the psychic hang-ups Hegseth himself appears to have inherited in the force.
The Pentagon has long touted its ability to strengthen the country’s youth, with one representative military advert from the 20 th century pledging to build muscle on the “hollow-chested boy.” A century later, in a 2010 sociological study, a pack of ROTC cadets and enlisted personnel hailed the benefits of a military body, including one who, during his interview, flexed his bicep and said “pah-pow.”
As a boy, Hegseth grappled with self-perceived inadequacies. “I didn’t get in fights as a kid and shied from confrontation because, frankly, I was scared of it, ” he admits in his 2016 memoir, the indulgently titled In the Arena: Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One Speech Can Reinvigorate America . “I didn’t know how to fight ideologically or physically.”
Because confrontation wasn't his father's "forte," Hegseth wrote, he turned to the Army for help. As I discovered while reporting my own book about masculinity and the military, America’s traditional soldier archetype is intoxicating but ultimately false, and fleeting, its building blocks meted out in small doses by men in power, who, for institutional purposes, withhold unconditional acceptance and always demand more. At the same time, military life can harden the body while neglecting the soul, forming a warped worldview that prescribes force as the answer to life’s problems. A belief in military virtues has long seemed to animate Hegseth, who trained as a cub troop in college before enduring real combat conditions in the Middle East and then graduating to Fox News, where he played a war hero on television .
Before Hegseth landed on the front lines, there were signs he was obsessed with proving his masculine bona fides. In 2001, as a Princeton sophomore, he joined Army ROTC, where, according to the student newspaper, he masterminded a new training lab: live-fire paintball fights in the woods on campus. Hegseth also participated in a dueling society, where, clad in a genteel dress shirt and tie, he once fired a paintball into the crotch of a Princeton College Democrat. Hegseth matched his public shows of force with what he later described as the role of an aggressive "social conservative warrior" on campus. He went after things he deemed soft or weak, be it a campus production of The Vagina Monologues or Princeton students calling for restraint after 9/11, a stance he ridiculed as “cowardice masquerading as conscience.”
Hegseth fashioned himself the alpha antidote to this soft progressivism. This stance was solidified at 19, when a stoic Vietnam veteran looked Hegseth dead in the eye and said, “Whatever you do, don’t miss your war.” Hegseth later wrote that this order “ricocheted around my brain like a stray bullet.” But his grandiose dreams of service were soon tempered by the realities of modern warfare. He’s described his first deployment, to Guantánamo Bay starting in 2004, as mindless and boring. Afterward, he reached out to his former platoon trainer from the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course at Fort Benning to secure a hardcore deployment with a legendary company. In 2005, he shipped off to Iraq with the 101 st Airborne. He saw some combat overseas and even netted two Bronze Stars, but they were the version of the medal without a “V,” indicating valor.
He seemed to harbor dreams of becoming one of America’s iconic military men; In the Arena borrows its title from Teddy Roosevelt's famous speech. Hegseth marveled at Roosevelt’s rhetoric and combat experience as a “Rough Rider,” including the 1898 Battle of San Juan Hill, which Hegseth notes, with awe, earned him the Medal of Honor and "catapulted him into the American consciousness."
Like so many other troops, Hegseth self-medicated with alcohol following his deployment in Iraq. “I drank a lot trying to process what I had been through while dealing with a civilian world that frankly just didn’t seem to care,” he told a reporter in 2022.
In 2017, police investigated a woman's allegations that Hegseth had drunkenly assaulted her at a convention for the California Federation of Republican Women. Hegseth denied the allegations and no criminal charges were filed against him—he later paid his accuser as part of a nondisclosure agreement. The next year, 2018, Hegseth’s mother sent him a lacerating email accusing him of using “women for his own power and ego.” She publicly walked back the email’s sentiment after it was obtained and published by The New York Times, calling her son a changed man and a “warrior.”
Hegseth’s time as a warrior had been marked by chaos in his civilian life. By the time Hegseth’s mother wrote that email, he had been divorced once after reportedly admitting to five extramaterial affairs during his first marriage, and was going through a second divorce after fathering a child with his current wife, Jennifer, out of wedlock. Through it all, he remained disciplined in his public military identity. In his time leading political advocacy groups—Vets for Freedom and the Koch-backed Concerned Veterans for America—Hegseth played a sort of neocon action figure, trotted out for White House press conferences, Fox News segments, and the “Defend Freedom Tour,” which featured Hegseth speechifying alongside “America's most patriotic rock band."
Hegseth’s act worked so long as he maintained his G.I. Joe appearance. He wore suits lined with American flags, adorned his body with jingoistic tattoos, and participated in televised acts of strength, even if they didn’t always go his way. Most famously, during a 2015 lumberjack segment featuring axe-throwing on Fox & Friends , Hegseth’s blade missed its target and hit the arm of a nearby drummer, who subsequently sued Hegseth and Fox, alleging “severe and serious personal injuries to his mind and body.” (The case was later discontinued.) Then, in 2019, Hegseth became so exhausted during a military charity swim across the Hudson River that he grasped for the waist of a Navy SEAL and hung on for dear life. Hegseth concluded the 2020 version of this same event by running to the 9/11 Memorial where, shirtless and in an itsy-bitsy swimsuit, he planted an American flag. All of it, of course, was filmed.
Hegseth now deploys similar antics as Pentagon chief. We see Hegseth kitted out with special operators, Hegseth shooting hoops at the Air Force Academy, Hegseth cranking out pull-ups with the 3 rd Marine Aircraft Wing or doing jumping jacks with Navy sailors on the USS Boxer. Just beneath the surface is what seems to be a desperate need for acceptance. The cruel irony in all this is that Hegseth’s unyielding public crusade may well ensnare many young boys who look a lot like Hegseth once did: kids who are smart but a bit scared. In his 2016 book, Hegseth laid out exacting expectations for his own children, in which “fifth-place trophies will meet the trash bin” and “bullies will be confronted.” In what feels like a forced bid at nominative determinism, he named his oldest boy “Gunner.”
In a sense, Hegseth’s work is simply a more radical version of military recruiting myths dating back decades. But historically, these messages were undergirded by some shred of belief that war was the ultimate bout of equals, man versus man. What makes Hegseth’s pitch different is that his promotion of physical strength seems almost entirely aesthetic. When it comes to the actual application of violence, Hegseth appears to relish low blows and sucker punches, preferring “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” Take the administration’s AI-influenced bombing of a school in Iran that killed more than 150 civilians, many of them children , or their zealous boat strikes in the Caribbean, including an almost surely illegal double-tap attack last September that targeted two survivors clinging to the wreckage. According to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book Regime Change , Hegseth has enjoyed watching videos of gory strikes of suspected terrorists in Africa and the Middle East, some of which he curated for the commander-in-chief.
Until Trump thwarted his plans last week, The Secretary of War was looking to produce yet another snuff film, telling the far-right streamer Jack Posobiec that he planned to publicly execute, by firing squad, Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of the 2009 mass shooting in Fort Hood, Texas. Hegseth seemed giddy at the prospect of such an ultimate display of power, one made even more disproportionate by the fact that Hasan is partially paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. Asked by Posobiec if he was aware of Hasan’s final requests, Hegseth answered bluntly: “Don’t care.” Then he pointed approvingly to Posobiec’s body, whom he previously invited to do PT with the troops.
“Not everybody can cut it,” said Hegseth, smiling.
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