Hegseth’s rationale for banning “gender ideology” from military academies, which train officers, is that it inhibits the unity and meritocracy required for military readiness among service members. As Hegseth’s order states, “The strength of the DoD comes from our unity and our shared purpose. We will focus on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards, and readiness.”
This is deeply ironic because no one is doing more to make explicit the deep cultural connection between war and masculinity than Pete Hegseth. He’s revealing something that’s always simmered beneath the surface of military culture: that war is the sole province of men.
And the way Hegseth thinks about gender in the military and the whole point of fighting wars is fundamentally flawed — not to mention detrimental to the armed forces and our national security.
I used to have to make the argument that the military’s culture was affected by ideas and beliefs about masculinity in mostly subtle ways. The only people who came right out and said war is about achieving manhood were centuries-old thinkers and a few contemporary military leaders or obscure far-right commentators. But now the sitting secretary of defense is unabashedly advancing this view and basing military policy on it.
If you want to see how ideas about masculinity warp those about war and the military, look no further than Hegseth’s last book, published in 2024, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.”
Hegseth asserts that the military exists to allow men to find their natural purpose as warriors. The military is the institution for turning undisciplined boys into real men. As he says, “The military has always been about social engineering … It takes average American boys, breaks down their body and mind, and builds them back up into members of a warfighting team.”
This point is brought home in a chapter titled “Men Need Purpose, Not Inclusion.” Here, Hegseth provides a macho, first-person narrative of his experience in Iraq in 2006. As an important part of a team of warrior men engaged in killing the enemy, he says he found his calling as a man. His operation “was all man, all merit, all mission.” He and his teammates were “tough, manly, and unapologetically lethal.” He discovers that “feeding a well-oiled killing machine” is his “jam.” He closes the chapter with the hope that the military continues to provide this purpose to other men.
The clichéd, gendered language he uses throughout the book to describe good soldiers is staggering. Proper warriors are “red-blooded American men,” “strong men,” “fighting men,” “courageous men,” “rock-ribbed men,” “masculine men,” “tough” men, “normal dudes,” men who do “PT” and wear “Carhartt jackets,” “cowboys,” and “alpha males.” He compares them to the fictional characters John McClain from the movie “Die Hard” and the superassassin John Wick, played by Keanu Reeves in the films.
And he goes on to describe the men who question the value of this type or hinder their unapologetic violence as “candy-asses,” “pussies,” “whores to wokesters,” “effeminate,” those who “suppress natural masculine instincts for honor,” “beta-male[s],” and “so-called men” who would “neuter” the military.
For Hegseth, a good man is a disciplined killer and protector of the weak. By nature, men are “life-takers.” Their societal role is to use violence to protect their communities.
Women, according to him, have a different nature. Women are “life-givers” whose biology prescribes caregiving and nurturing. Their job is to reproduce and raise future generations as well as provide succor to warrior men.
This is why he thinks women should not serve in combat. For Hegseth, including women in war upsets the natural gender order. Making women into warriors separates them from “the natural purposes of their core instincts.” And it undermines men’s “instincts” to treat women gently.
There is also reason to wonder if Hegseth believes women should be full citizens. He recently reposted a video in which several pastors say that women should not have the right to vote.
This all has had devastating impacts on women and gender nonconforming people in the military. Hegseth has overseen the removal of hundreds of trans service members who were meeting or exceeding all performance requirements. And he has removed a disproportionate number of women from leadership positions, most recently the Naval Academy’s first woman to serve as its superintendent, Vice Admiral Yvette Davids. It is also bad for men in the military. Contrary to what Hegseth seems to think, being forged into an unthinking, unfeeling killer is not good for anyone. John Wick is not a role model.
But the effect of Hegseth’s gender crusade extends well beyond the culture of the military. It has a dangerous impact on the way we fight wars. There is a direct relationship between treating men in the military as killing machines and a misguided way of thinking about war.
Hegseth argues that the masculine nature of military service is linked to the nature of war. War is really a contest of masculine violence. If you outkill your opponent, you will win the war. Lethality is all that matters from a strategic point of view. He claims, “Land warfare … is defined by how many people you can slaughter in one space, at one time — limiting the will and capacity of your enemy to fight.”
The problem with this is that it reduces winning wars to winning battles. But at least as far back as Carl von Clausewitz, an early 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist, strategists have understood that there is much more to winning wars than winning battles. The point of war is to achieve a nonmilitary political good like sovereignty or a just peace. There is not always a connection between winning battles and achieving these goals. In fact, you can win every battle yet lose the war — as the United States did in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The United States entered these wars with plans to achieve primarily military objectives — namely winning battles. But there was little thought given to how these achievements would result in long-term success. After quickly defeating their opponents on the battlefield, the United States struggled to establish stable new Afghan and Iraqi governments. Then the US military found itself in protracted fighting against insurgents that it initially thought could be defeated by more military might. The United States had to learn the hard way — and not for the first time — that winning such wars required much more than lethality. In the end the United States won virtually all the battles but lost the war in both countries.
The United States does not have a problem with lethality on the battlefield. We have a problem understanding how our lethality affects the world and a tendency to think martial violence can solve complex problems. We need to be better thinkers, not better killers. We need more historical and cultural understanding, not better tactical skills.
Hegseth doesn’t see it this way. According to him, the United States lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because we didn’t kill enough. If it weren’t for the lawyers — or “jag-offs,” as he calls them — restraining military tactics out of concern for noncombatant casualties and detainee abuse, we could have ended the wars sooner and won. The wars dragged on because we lacked the warrior impulse to do what was required to win. He says, “The fact that we don’t do what is necessary is the reason wars become endless. Modern wars never end, because we won’t finish them.”
In Hegseth’s worldview, wars are contests in killing because wars are contests of warrior masculinity. The side with the real men is the winner. If we lose a war, it must be because we lack real men.
Whereas America failed in Iraq and Afghanistan because of a misguided faith in war, Hegseth is overseeing “reforms” of the US military to emphasize battlefield fighting that simply double down on this faith. This may make the military more “lethal,” but it makes us less ready to use the military for good. I fear we are now even more likely to engage in ill-conceived war than we were 20 years ago.
So, in a sense, Hegseth is right: “gender ideology” is a threat to national security. But it’s his ideology that we should be worried about.