During a recent visit to a Navy ship, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly became angry after seeing sailors with facial hair. The Navy requires sailors to be clean-shaven unless they’ve been given a medical waiver. America is at war. The ship and its crew were operating amid heightened tensions. Hegseth’s attention was on beards.
Pentagon officials subsequently held meetings in which subordinates were told that Hegseth was closely watching the services’ progress on grooming rules. Weeks later, the Navy limited medical shaving waivers — which let a sailor with a qualifying skin condition keep about a quarter-inch of trimmed facial hair instead of having to shave daily — to four consecutive 90-day renewals, a maximum of 12 months. Sailors whose condition hasn’t cleared by then can be pushed out through administrative separation, a discharge process that doesn’t require a court-martial, though the Navy says no one will be separated under the new rule before July 2027.
Then, this week, Hegseth announced another priority: Every service member age 30 or older, including women, will be screened annually for low testosterone. Younger troops may volunteer for these screenings. Those judged as deficient will be offered hormone therapy, part of what Hegseth called building a “High-T Department of War.”
Together, the two policies reveal something much larger than disagreements over grooming or medical care. They show that Hegseth is working to replace military standards rooted in mission with standards that better reflect his personal image of the American warrior.
There are legitimate reasons for doctors to test individual patients for testosterone deficiency. But Hegseth has offered no evidence that low testosterone has become a force-wide readiness problem requiring annual screenings of everyone over 30. The Pentagon hasn’t explained what standard applies to women or what purpose their results will serve. Instead, the policy arrived wrapped in language borrowed from the online “manosphere” and surrounding industries. “High-T” is not a clinical term here. It’s a declaration of what Hegseth believes toughness looks like.
His campaign against beards works the same way. The Navy says the standard protects the seal on respirators and gas masks. But the military’s own medical experts say that claim doesn’t hold up. In 2022, Lt. Col. Simon Ritchie, an Air Force dermatologist who has studied the issue, called the seal claim unsubstantiated, resting on a handful of anecdotes rather than rigorous testing of the masks troops actually wear today. Canada’s military has permitted beards since 2018 without a single related equipment failure.
The same mask-seal logic is now being tested in court: Seventeen Black firefighters in Washington, D.C. are suing over a clean-shaven policy they say rests on the same unproven claim. What survives once the safety rationale is stripped away is aesthetics — a clean-shaven face presented as evidence of discipline, with little regard for the bodies on which the standard operates.
The condition behind most shaving waivers, pseudofolliculitis barbae, occurs when shaved hairs curl back into the skin, causing painful inflammation, lesions and sometimes permanent scarring. It can affect anyone with tightly curled facial hair, but studies estimate it can affect up to 83% of Black men. For many white service members, the clean-shaven standard means a few minutes with a razor each morning. For Black men with PFB, it means repeatedly injuring their skin, or seeking an accommodation their defense secretary treats publicly as evidence of collapsing standards.
The pattern extends beyond hormones and hair. Hegseth has questioned whether women belong in ground combat units at all and has blocked the promotions of women selected by boards of senior officers — decisions that have nothing to do with medicine. The Trump administration has also banned transgender troops based partly on the theory that hormone treatment would be too hard to sustain in the field, even as hormone treatment will now be available to other troops as a readiness enhancement.
The governing principle is not medicine. Hormone therapy becomes a readiness enhancement when it makes a man more masculine. The same category of treatment becomes grounds for exclusion when it’s a transgender American who needs it.
Where medicine isn’t even part of the equation, the preference shows itself just as plainly, in who gets promoted and which roles women are allowed to hold. Across all of these policies, Hegseth is selecting for one image of a warrior: male, conventionally masculine and clean-shaven. Because the beard policy falls disproportionately on Black service members, the force it favors becomes whiter as a result.
Military standards are supposed to answer a single question: Can this person perform the mission? Testosterone levels don’t measure judgment, courage, technical skill or the ability to lead under fire. A clean-shaven face doesn’t establish discipline, whatever the Navy claims about masks. Neither tell us whether someone can maintain a jet, defend a network, find an enemy submarine or command a platoon. These policies won’t reliably separate capable service members from incapable ones. They will sort service members by Hegseth’s prejudices, not their qualifications.
That has consequences beyond the people directly affected. Service members read signals from the top. Capable Americans who raised their right hands to serve shouldn’t have to spend their careers wondering whether they are being judged by their results or by characteristics unrelated to military performance. Some will leave. Many will decide never to join. The military will lose talented volunteers it should be fighting to keep because its leaders made clear that performance alone was no longer enough.
The people most comfortable staying will increasingly be those who already fit Hegseth’s preferred archetype.
The United States is engaged in a consequential war. Its military faces real questions about strategy, weapons production, operational strain and civilian deaths. Hegseth is entitled to demand standards. He is also obligated to show they serve a military purpose. Nothing about these policies makes it more likely that the military will prevail in its next war. They make it more likely that capable Americans will conclude they no longer belong in uniform. Instead, the force entrusted with defending the nation will become smaller, narrower and ultimately less capable.
Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. He writes about leadership and democracy.
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