Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered an impassioned speech that might otherwise have been a departmental memo to 800 generals and admirals Tuesday morning, telling the leaders that the military will “restore a ruthless, dispassionate and common sense application of standards” that will no longer tolerate overweight troops or beards.
Much of Hegseth’s speech focused on issues he has publicly criticized and is already changing. This month, for instance, DoD issued a ban on permanent beard waivers, a move critics say unfairly targets Black troops who more frequently suffer chronic razor burn.
“No more beardos,” he said. “The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done.” If troops want beards, then they can join special operations forces, he added. These units are not exclusively subject to the general DoD-wide policies.
It is highly irregular for all of the military’s generals and admirals to be summoned to the same location for anything, but especially for topics not directly related to daily national security concerns — those summoned included the joint chiefs of staff, principle military advisors, service leaders, and combatant commanders who oversee swaths of the globe where US troops live, train, and fight.
Mandatory daily physical training is also set to start, along with newly enforced twice-yearly fitness tests.
“It’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” said Hegseth. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals in the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2020, nearly 20% of active duty troops could be designated as obese, a problem exacerbated by obesity throughout the country. Previous studies have cited other readiness risks of obese troops within the National Guard and reserve forces.
New reviews of women who hold combat arms jobs are set to take place as well. “Any place where tried and true physical standards were altered, especially since 2015 when combat arms standards were changed to ensure females could qualify, must be returned to their original standard,” said Hegseth
“This is not about preventing women from serving,” he said. “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”
Such a sentiment has long been widely held by female service members, who are almost uniformly uncomfortable with the idea that they could more easily gain a position under relaxed standards. Only a limited number of women occupy such roles in regular ground combat forces, and even fewer in special operations forces.
It was not immediately clear how such a review would square with the fact that the services already hold women to male standards for ground combat jobs. For jobs where female troops adhere to different physical standards than men, the physical demands are different from ground combat roles.
Female aviators and submariners, for instance, hold what are considered to be combat jobs (though not designated as “ground combat”) and are held to a separate, female fitness standard because these jobs do not usually include tasks like running across a battlefield in heavy equipment. Whether changes are coming to these kinds of jobs remains to be seen in the wake of Hegseth’s new directives for what the Trump administration is calling the Department of War.
Also up for review is how the DoD defines toxic leadership, bullying, and hazing, to better “empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.”
“Real ‘toxic leadership’ is promoting people based on immutable characteristics or quotas instead of based on merit,” he said, adding that excessive equal opportunity complaints and perceived abuse of the military’s anonymous complaints system have spurred a new “no more walking on eggshells’ policy.
Criticizing the previous administration and what he characterized as a “woke” degradation of the armed forces, he put a challenge to the flag officers in the room.
“If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink,” Hegseth said, “then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”
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