The High-T Presidency: A Pentagon Turned Culture-War Prop, and a Commander-in-Chief Adrift
Pete Hegseth has spent the week explaining why testosterone levels are now a matter of national security. What he cannot explain is why the world’s most powerful military is being run as a masculinity project — or why the man who put him in charge remains at the head of it.
The video was captioned “The High-T Department of War.” In it, the Defense Secretary of the United States, dressed in Pentagon-issue seriousness, announced that active-duty service members age 30 and older will now undergo annual testosterone deficiency screenings as a matter of “combat readiness.” Troops under 30 may volunteer. Treatment, Pete Hegseth said, will remain optional. That last bit — the fig leaf of choice — is the part he wants the country to fixate on. The country should not.
Because the substance of Wednesday’s announcement is not a health policy. It is a statement of ideology. Hegseth did not release supporting research. He did not explain how the Pentagon will define a deficiency, or who will interpret the results, or how the notoriously unreliable single-morning testosterone reading — the kind clinicians warn should never be a diagnosis on its own — will be prevented from becoming one. He did, however, find time to tell the American public that hormones make you a warrior, that the fighter is the country’s “most decisive tactical advantage,” and that maintaining that advantage is a “sacred duty.”
There is a word for a policy that isolates a single hormone, labels it the biological source of national strength, and offers medication to correct any deficit. That word is not readiness. It is a worldview. And the worldview now runs the Pentagon.
“It sounds like gender-affirming care to me.”
— Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Iraq War veteran, Senate Armed Services Committee
I. A Department of War, in Name and in Vibe
To understand Wednesday, understand September 5, 2025. On that day, President Trump signed Executive Order 14347, directing the Department of Defense to operate under the secondary title “Department of War” and instructing Hegseth to seek legislation making the change permanent. The president, in remarks reported by multiple outlets, called the 1947 renaming to “Defense” the “first sign of wokeness” in America. Hegseth chimed in that the military would now “go on offense, not just on defense,” with “maximum lethality” that would not be “politically correct.”
Note what has and has not happened since. Congress has not renamed the department. The Pentagon has estimated the branding change could cost up to $2 billion. The strategic environment — Ukraine still burning, an active war with Iran, unresolved deterrence questions in the Pacific — has not been improved by the letterhead. But the culture has changed. When the Secretary of War now captions a video “High-T Department of War,” he is not being cheeky. He is describing a doctrine.
The Announcement
Hegseth said troops 30 and over would be tested annually as part of the Periodic Health Assessment. He did not release a start date, define “deficiency,” or say whether standards would differ by sex. Daily Voice.
The Medical Gap
The American Urological Association cautions that a single lab draw is not a diagnosis. Epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding warned the plan could be “very confusing at best, and potentially harmful at worst.” IBTimes UK.
The Political Frame
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has publicly discussed taking testosterone. The FDA in April invited drugmakers to pursue new uses for testosterone therapy. The screening slots into a broader hormone politics. STAT News.
The Silence on Women
The Pentagon did not respond when asked whether female service members would be evaluated for perimenopausal hormone care. There is no equivalent program. CNN.
II. What This Says About the Leadership of the Force
Pete Hegseth’s résumé for this job was a weekend cable-news show and two books arguing that women and Black service members had made the military weaker. Since he was confirmed, he has governed as he promised he would. NPR has confirmed that he personally intervened to strip four Army officers — two Black men and two women — from a one-star general promotion list. The New York Times, as summarized by The New Republic, later reported he did the same to nine Navy officers, disproportionately women and non-white, chosen by a board of senior admirals. This month, as MS Now reported, he removed seven more, including Rear Adm. Amy Bauernschmidt — the first woman to command a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier — from consideration for two-star admiral. The result: for the first time in more than a decade, no female active-duty naval officer is likely to be promoted to admiral this year.
Pentagon policy is unambiguous. A Secretary of Defense may intervene in a promotion list only for moral, mental, physical, or professional failings that would compromise an officer’s ability to lead. Hegseth has repeatedly disregarded that policy. He has also fired Gen. CQ Brown, the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy — both without stated cause. He has sidelined Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the sole female flag officer on NATO’s Military Committee, and pulled Vice Adm. Yvette Davids from her post as the Naval Academy’s first female superintendent.
Set that record beside a testosterone directive and one thing becomes obvious. The Secretary of War is not troubleshooting a personnel gap. He is engineering a demographic one. And he is doing it, according to the reporting, sometimes through direct chain-of-command sabotage: the Democratic Women’s Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus flagged one particularly ugly claim — that Hegseth’s chief of staff told the Army secretary the president “would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.”
This “proves that Secretary Hegseth takes direction from the far corners of the manosphere.”
— Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), Air Force veteran
III. What It Does to Women in Uniform
Roughly one in five active-duty service members is a woman. Women fly F-35s. They command carriers. They lead NATO commands. They have died in every American war since the founding. And a policy that treats the biological marker of masculinity as the yardstick of “the individual warfighter” — while offering no comparable framework for female troops — tells them exactly where they stand in the new Department of War.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, herself a Blackhawk pilot who lost both legs in Iraq, called out the double standard directly. As reported by CNN, she urged Hegseth to extend hormone screenings across the force to catch fertility issues that disproportionately affect service members of both sexes. Representative Chrissy Houlahan, an Air Force veteran, was blunter, tying the order to the online masculinity ecosystem that has plainly shaped the Secretary’s public identity.
The policy also lands in the middle of Hegseth’s other project — remaking female service standards. He has ordered that combat-role troops meet a gender-neutral, age-adjusted male standard, has said women should not serve in combat, and, at Quantico last fall, told hundreds of senior officers there would be “no more beardos” and no more “fat troops.” A force is not made lethal by shrinking the pool of who can serve. A force is made lethal by developing everyone in it.
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IV. National Defense, Global Signaling, and the Cost of Frivolity
The United States projects force in two ways. The first is materiel — the ships, the missiles, the satellites. The second, and often the more decisive, is credibility: allies who believe our commitments and adversaries who believe our warnings. Credibility is corroded not by a single policy but by a pattern of unseriousness at the top.
Consider what the Pentagon has spent its bandwidth on this year. A $2-billion cosmetic renaming. Fitness re-tests. Beard bans. Purges of general officers along demographic lines. And now hormone testing as a warrior’s rite. Meanwhile, an active shooting war with Iran continues, allies in Europe are hedging, and the industrial base that would supply a prolonged Pacific conflict remains under-resourced. The unmistakable message to foreign capitals is that the American defense establishment is being run for the domestic culture war, not for global deterrence.
The message to service members is worse. When the country’s top defense civilian frames “biological foundation” as the requirement to “sustain the fight,” he tells every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, and guardian that their advancement will be judged not on judgment, competence, or courage, but on a lab value. Militaries that select for that kind of thing lose to militaries that select for the other kind.
V. What It Means for the Average American
The average American does not read Pentagon press releases. But the average American pays for this Department. The average American’s son or daughter is who signs up. The average American is who will be asked, at some indeterminate hour, to accept the outcome of a war conducted by the leadership currently in place. Every one of those Americans has an interest in whether the people in charge are focused on the mission or focused on their brand.
Hegseth’s Pentagon has now told the country, on the record, that it is focused on the brand. That is not a small revelation. It is a preview of how the machinery will behave under stress — who will get promoted, who will get scapegoated, what advice the president will hear, and what he will not.
Trump signs Executive Order 14347, directing the Pentagon to operate as the “Department of War” and to seek legislation to make the name permanent. He calls “Defense” the “first sign of wokeness.”
Hegseth blocks four Army colonels — two Black men, two women — from promotion to one-star general, after months of pressing Army leadership to strike their names.
Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces a bill to establish a Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office — the framework for a 25th Amendment inquiry — citing Trump’s Iran threats and “escalating erratic conduct.”
Hegseth removes nine Navy officers from a one-star admiral list, most of them women and non-white officers. A D.C. Circuit panel rules his transgender service ban motivated by animus.
Hegseth blocks seven Navy officers, including the first woman to command a nuclear carrier, from two-star promotion. Days later, he announces the testosterone screening order, captioning it “The High-T Department of War.”
“Unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” — and the word the drafters left open.
The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967. Section 4 provides that when the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet transmit to Congress a written declaration that the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the Vice President immediately assumes the presidency as Acting President. The framers of the amendment declined to define “unable” or “inability” — and they did so on purpose. The drafting history is explicit: the point of leaving the word undefined was to preserve latitude for future Congresses and Cabinets to interpret capacity in the circumstances actually before them, not to lock the Republic into 1967’s medical vocabulary.
That latitude is what makes the argument possible today. A president who conducts military policy through Truth Social outbursts, who directs a $2 billion cosmetic renaming of the Department of Defense while an active war continues, who threatens on Easter Sunday that a foreign civilization “will die tonight”, and who has installed a Secretary of War whose signature initiative is a hormone-testing program branded “High-T” — such a president is, on the face of it, exercising the powers of the office. The question the amendment poses is whether he is exercising them capably. The drafters gave us room to ask.
Legislators who have called for the inquiry
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced a bill establishing a Commission on Presidential Capacity, citing an “increasingly volatile and unstable situation.” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) called for the amendment’s use after reporting that the president was excluded from a live rescue operation because he was “acting so crazy.” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) issued a formal call after the Iran civilization threat. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the Easter Sunday post the words of “a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.” Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) have made similar calls. Former CIA Director John Brennan told MS Now the amendment “was written with Donald Trumps in mind.”
The constitutional argument
The pattern is not a single episode; it is the pattern that matters. A Commander-in-Chief who cannot be trusted in a real-time rescue operation, who publishes nuclear-adjacent threats, who staffs the Pentagon with a culture-war project instead of a defense one, and who cannot distinguish a policy fight from an ego wound is exercising the office in a way that raises a real question of capacity. Section 4 exists precisely for the case the framers did not want to spell out — because they knew they could not anticipate every form incapacity might take. This is one of them.
The honest barriers
The barriers are not modest. Section 4 requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet — that is, Vice President JD Vance and Trump appointees, most of whom have staked their political futures on the president’s approval. If the president contests the declaration, a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress is required to keep him removed. In a Republican-held Congress, the arithmetic is honest: this will not happen tomorrow.
Why the barriers do not negate the case
They do not negate the case because the amendment is not primarily a mechanism. It is a standard. It tells the country what capacity looks like and what its absence looks like. Naming the standard, laying it against the record, and calling on the officials whose duty it is to act — those are constitutional obligations that do not become moot because the vote is hard. The Republic does not preserve itself by staying quiet about what it sees. It preserves itself by refusing to pretend it does not see it.
Editorial Conclusion
A country that lets its Secretary of War brand a hormone as a warrior’s essence, and its president rename a department to soothe an ego, is a country that has stopped taking its own military seriously.
Pete Hegseth is unfit for the job he holds, and the record of promotions blocked, generals fired, and standards rewritten around gender is his own. But he serves at the pleasure of a president whose capacity to command has been visibly deteriorating in public view, and whose choices — of subordinates, of policies, of language — have made a Department of War in the crudest and least strategic sense of the word.
The 25th Amendment was written with a word — unable — left open on purpose. What that word will finally mean is not decided in a Cabinet room. It is decided in whether the country’s institutions, its lawmakers, and its citizens will name what they are watching. This is what we are watching. Say so.
Sources & References
- Daily Voice — Hegseth Orders Testosterone Screenings For US Service Members: ‘The High-T Department Of War’
- CNN — Hegseth announces new policy to test troops for low testosterone
- NBC News — U.S. military will test service members’ testosterone levels, Pete Hegseth says
- Al Jazeera — Pete Hegseth says US military to start testosterone screening for over 30s
- Newsweek — Hegseth’s new military testosterone rules: Who is on the hook?
- STAT News — Hegseth’s testosterone screening plan divides medical experts
- IBTimes UK — Pete Hegseth’s ‘Gender-Affirming’ Testosterone Plan Blasted by Public Health Scientist
- Task & Purpose — Hegseth announces testosterone screening for troops 30 and older
- Forbes — Hegseth Announces ‘Testosterone Deficiency’ Screening For Soldiers 30 And Over
- The New Republic — Hegseth Personally Nixed Black and Female Officers’ Promotions
- NPR — Defense Secretary Hegseth intervened to stop promotions of Black and female officers
- ABC News — Hegseth blocks promotion of several Navy officers to 1-star rank
- MS Now / Maddow Blog — Hegseth isn’t done blocking promotions for women in military leadership roles
- MS Now — Raskin offers bill setting up 25th Amendment process to remove Trump from office
- The Daily Beast — ‘Not Well’: Trump’s Wild Tantrum Sparks Call for Drastic Action
- Rep. Krishnamoorthi — Krishnamoorthi Calls for President Trump’s Removal Under 25th Amendment
- Wikipedia — Executive Order 14347 · Restoring the United States Department of War
- Salon — Trump renames the Defense Department — and betrays his own voters
- NBC News — Trump’s Pentagon name change could cost up to $2 billion
- HuffPost / AOL — Democrats Ramp Up Calls For 25th Amendment After Trump’s ‘Unhinged’ Iran Rant
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