It's About Fucking Time

For Some Raw American Beef

Following World War II, the U.S. military pored over the conflict with remarkable humility, scrutinizing everything from logistics to leadership because it understood that the surest path to losing the next war was failing to honestly explain the last one, and the burgeoning Cold War with the Soviet Union demanded serious scholarship of the profession of arms. Every conflict is an opportunity to ask hard questions, and none more so than a losing campaign. Were the objectives realistic? Did the strategy make sense? Did we understand the enemy? Did we build the right force? What assumptions did we base our decisions on that turned out to be incorrect and dangerous? Great militaries become stronger by interrogating their assumptions rather than flattering them.

I, for one, am glad the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, will not sleep until our latest defeat by a third-rate military power is properly explained and addressed. Apparently, the evidence is in: The Strait of Hormuz would still be wide open today, gasoline would cost fifty cents a gallon, America’s last twenty years of military campaigns would have ended in decisive victory, and history itself would have bent in our favor if only boys in uniform had gone to war with sick lat spreads, shredded glutes, and python biceps.

Amateurs would argue that it is foolish to start a war of choice from the air with an adversary when a quarter of the world’s economy sits within said adversary’s multiple, disseminated, low-cost and sustainable weapons envelopes. But that’s why Napoleon famously said: “amateurs talk strategy, experts talk Zercher curls.”

Pete Hegseth has rightly decided that one of the great military readiness crises of the twenty-first century is testosterone. Between recruiting shortfalls, drone warfare, artificial intelligence, Chinese shipbuilding, electronic warfare, cyber operations, and the uncomfortable memory that America has spent the better part of two decades losing strategic competitions against opponents with a fraction of our resources, someone looked around the Pentagon and concluded that the real problem was that the 101st Airborne might need hormone replacement therapy.

I can tell you from personal experience, when I patrolled with one other SEAL to extract on NVD’s a click through the demolished city of Fallujah so as not to give away our team’s location, I wasn’t thinking “any one of these shadows in the rubble could be holding an ambush,” I was thinking “I wish my ass looked better in these pants.”

As one does.

And Hegseth gets it.

It’s about fucking time.

One can only assume this is the opening act of a much larger modernization effort. My Pentagon contacts are hinting that Jose Canseco is to be appointed Undersecretary of Bench Press, responsible for evaluating the military’s national deadlift readiness and ensuring every infantry battalion can post respectable numbers on Insta. His office could issue quarterly reports ranking combat commands by incline bench percentage. Leave all that cyber drone hunter-killer nonsense to the nerds!

10 mg of creatine is the newest addition to MRE’s, along with a pre-workout mix heavy on beta-alanine. Cherry flavored to start.

Promotion boards would naturally begin awarding additional points for visible vascularity. Command climate surveys could include mandatory measurements of forearm circumference. Ranger School is to be canceled. Soldiers lose weight during that silly course. Hard pass. No more swamp phase, just pump phase. Quad symmetry is more important than the OODA Loop.

Sure, all those nerds will say that history remains stubbornly unimpressed. Those soy boys will argue that the Wehrmacht fielded plenty of exceptionally fit young men which did not save Germany from catastrophic strategic decisions. Soviet soldiers marched through unimaginable hardship because logistics, production, leadership, and adaptation eventually overwhelmed tactical excellence. Vietnam did not hinge on who had the higher testosterone levels, and Afghanistan was not lost because American platoons skipped leg day. Iraq was never to be transformed by another set of curls.

No war has ever been won based on the individual physical fitness of soldiers. There are zero examples, ever. And thinking that is a determining factor in armed conflict is yet another demonstration of the sheer idiocy of Pete Hegseth.

War rewards organizations, not individuals. That was true at Cannae and Omaha Beach, and it is true now. American service members have never lacked courage. They have rarely lacked fitness, and when they did, it was in situations such as Corregedor that were defined by privation, not laziness. They have never lacked a willingness to sacrifice. What they have lacked, at critical moments, are leaders willing to match tactical excellence with strategic discipline.

Military service is the ultimate team sport. Nobody wins alone. The infantryman depends on intelligence analysts, mechanics, logisticians, medics, pilots, cyber specialists, satellite operators, engineers, and commanders making thousands of interconnected decisions correctly. Victory emerges from coordination, not individual athleticism. Our problem in Iraq was not overpowering the enemy, it was finding them. People are not dying in twenty-first-century combat because they are insufficiently masculine, they are dying because they underestimate adversaries who possess intelligence, creativity, and agency of their own. This has been reinforced in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf.

War is a contest between systems and fought largely by twenty-year-olds whose courage is directed by thirty-year-olds whose job is to leverage technology, creativity, intelligence, logistics, and disciplined strategy more effectively than the other side. American military failures are top-down, not bottom-up. And of the wars in the American public conscience today, Ukraine and Iran, none have been started or directed by a man who knows what it means to press check a weapon and step off on a mission where they could come back in a body bag. The truth is, a nation that mistakes testosterone levels for military readiness is measuring the wrong thing entirely. The young Americans carrying the rifles have never been the weakest link.

Well, that’s what the nerds will say. So sign me up for more of the Hegseth leadership: bench press us all into more wars with your HRT and your shrunken, atrophied testicles, Pete. Just make sure our boys oil up right, those beaches in Cuba aren’t going to storm themselves, and we want DOD’s Instagram all over America’s FYP.