President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered nearly every general and admiral in the U.S. military to Quantico, Virginia, for a speech on Tuesday. The subject wasn’t a new strategy for countering China or a vision for AI integration into the force. The subject was “warrior culture.” According to Secretary Hegseth, warrior culture in the U.S. military will be revitalized by focusing on two things: height, weight, and grooming standards, and purging the ranks of “woke” politics.
Sure, it’s always great to recommit to fitness and individual performance, but given the dangerous world we live in—the war in Ukraine, Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the war in Gaza—it was bizarre to hear the secretary say that the critical strategic challenges facing our nation would be “another speech for another day.” Instead, Secretary Hegseth called in all his senior leadership on short notice to give the equivalent of a TED Talk on “ending the war on warriors,” then noting “I heard someone wrote a book about that,” as he plugged his 2024 memoir.
