Pentagon Pete and the War on Waistlines

When Donald Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth talks about “standards,” it now sounds like a declaration of war on his own body mass. On Monday, the self-proclaimed fitness warrior proudly boasted that several members of the Texas National Guard had been removed from deployment - because, according to Hegseth, they “did not meet the physical requirements of the new military.” “Standards are back,” he proclaimed, as if discipline were a new weapon and calorie burn the measure of national strength.

The scene that set everything off was both banal and viral: a photo showed Texas troops arriving in Illinois - round, sweaty, human. But instead of preaching camaraderie, Hegseth responded with public humiliation. “Fat soldiers, fat generals - that is unbecoming of the United States Armed Forces,” he had said before. Now he means business: anyone who doesn’t fit his idea of fighting weight is out.

The Texas military administration explained that “in the course of rapid mobilization” a “validation” had been carried out and a small group replaced that was “not in compliance.” Words that sound more like a diet manual than a defense department. But Hegseth’s line is clear: no belly under the stars and stripes. Even in the halls of the Pentagon, he recently complained, it was “tiring to look into the command structures and see overweight admirals and generals.” What Hegseth sells with an iron face as reform is in truth a performance of vanity, power, and ideological purity. In Quantico at the end of September, he assembled hundreds of officers - not to discuss strategy or peace, but to celebrate physical fitness tests. “If the Secretary of War can do hard training, so can everyone else,” he told them, as if the Pentagon were a fitness club with a nuclear license.

The grotesque irony: the remaining 200 Texas soldiers in Illinois cannot go anywhere for the time being. An appeals court judge halted the deployment on the grounds that she saw “no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois.” The Department of Homeland Security, Judge April Perry wrote dryly, had an “unreliable perception of reality.” And so Hegseth’s troops - top fit and stood down - remain a symbol of his era: an army marching primarily against itself. Between the words “defense” and “denial” there is no room left for Pete Hegseth. Only a mirror.