When Children Become a “Resource” – “Only the Weak Will Fail”

Hegseth said a sentence without hesitation: parents should entrust the military with “their most precious resource – their sons and daughters.” At exactly this point it becomes clear how far American politics has drifted from what it claims to defend. Children are not a resource. Not numbers you record. Not material you order when Washington demands it. And yet this sentence is spoken as if it were the most ordinary requirement in the world.

“We are asking American taxpayers to fund the world's greatest military, and we are asking mothers and fathers across America to trust us with their most precious resource, their sons and daughters. And we will honor their trust and their sacrifice.”

The striking and alarming thing is the matter-of-factness behind it. They speak of the world’s greatest military, of sacrifice, of service to the country. But in the end one word remains that reveals everything: resource. Whoever speaks like this thinks in terms of a system that needs new recruits no matter the cost. Hegseth tried to soften the whole thing with the unbelievable promise that they would “honor” this trust. But that is not the point. The mistake does not lie in a lack of honor. The mistake lies in a view of young people that places them in a category that has nothing to do with their worth. And it is not an accidental sentence – it is Hegseth, who constantly claims to act in the name of freedom while demanding everything and remembering it no longer the next morning. But that would go too far now.

Let us simply look at the reality of the credibility of this statement:

On April 4, 2025, on a Friday that felt as if written from a script for tragedies of democracy, Donald Trump wrote a sentence. It was short, written in all caps, and in truth a mirror of what this presidency had become: a screaming monologue without listeners. “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!” A president surrounded by armored vehicles, golf courses, and champagne glasses sends this message to a nation in a state of emergency. While the financial markets trembled, the Dow Jones had fallen by 2,200 points, the heaviest loss since the early pandemic months, Trump played golf at Mar-a-Lago. And while he enjoyed a candlelight dinner with donors from his Super PAC machine MAGA Inc., the sentence flickered across social media like a signal from another world. A cold world. A world without memory, without compassion, without responsibility. Four young men were already dead at that moment. Troy S. Knutson-Collins (28), Jose Duenez Jr. (25), Edvin F. Franco (25), Dante D. Taitano (21), all members of the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division. Missing during a tactical training exercise in Lithuania. Their vehicle, a steel colossus, symbol of American military power, was found on March 26 in a peat bog. Their bodies: difficult to recover, harder still to comprehend. Trump, the Commander-in-Chief, did not attend the repatriation of the fallen soldiers. No handshake for grieving parents, no glance, no silence at the ramp of the military plane. Instead a dinner in his own club. Instead of mourning, a tweet. Instead of sympathy, an aphorism of cruelty. “Only the weak will fail.”

But who were the weak? Are they the families who are losing their children in these days? Are they the investors whose savings evaporated within minutes? Are they the refugees whose deportation under Trump’s executive orders becomes a threat to their lives? Or are they the soldiers themselves who lose their lives abroad without their president honoring them with a single word? The sentence is no accident. It is a rigid claim. The US government preaches an ideology of strength that knows neither restraint nor law. An ideology in which compassion is weakness, empathy is a mistake, and human losses are merely collateral damage in the struggle for influence, power, domination. That Trump’s sentence was published amid an economic shock following the announcement of his global tariff increases, which experts described as a politically motivated act of economic self-destruction, is no coincidence. It was strategy. Crisis as an ego stage. The people as the audience of a fascist theater piece.

While Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda personally attended the repatriation of the US soldiers at the time, the American president was conspicuously absent. While others stood in silence, Trump spoke in slogans. While mothers cried, it was wine time in Mar-a-Lago.

And that is exactly why the sentence does not stand for an unfortunate formulation but for character, morality, and intelligence. A politics that has difficulty seeing people as people calls children a “resource.” And that is exactly why this moment feels strange. It shows how far the language of those at the top has drifted from the reality of those who ultimately pay the price. Dehumanization always begins with a word. And that is not only the case in America.