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Notes -
For a somewhat lower stakes culture war topic:
A few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that troops who need an exemption from shaving their facial hair for longer than a year should get kicked out of the service.
The culture war aspect here is twofold:
To the first, I have never been particularly impressed by the "warrior" posturing. Most proponents of it that I've met been underwhelming human beings (at best), but that might be forgivable if it cashed out in superior performance. However, if the performance of the Russian Army (or the IJA or...) is any indication, boring competence and logistical capability seems to heavily outweigh posturing about warrior spirit when it comes to combat performance. (These are not strictly in tension, but leaning into "warrior ethos" seems to go hand in hand with disdain for unglamorous organizational work).
It's also not really clear to me how beards compromise warrior ethos (especially since vets seem to love them), but I've also never been in the military, so it's possible there's a piece of experiential knowledge I am missing.
To the second: while I strongly doubt this is a scheme to purge the military of black soldiers, I struggle to think of a practical justification for this policy. The traditional rationale is for gas masks, but that doesn't apply to special operations forces (who are presumably so high speed and low drag that they outrun the poison gas) and beard-compatible respirators already exist.
The beard issue is silly ;what's more concerning is Hegseth saying that rules of engagement are for pussies. He advocated for trump to pardon men like eddie gallagher and the blackwater operators at nisour square. At least for now the military is limited to blowing up narco boats and standing around federal buildings.
I really wish you and the person below you would just link to the part of the speech you are talking about.
And lest you say this is being uncharitable to Hegseth, as yunyun33 noted, he is on record campaigning for war criminals to be pardoned. If you think it's unfair to hold soldiers accountable for murdering prisoners, I think it's fair to characterize you as being pro-war crimes.
Being hamstrung by dumb rules of engagement is a common complaint of GWOT veterans.
Jocko had a short solo episode in response to the Kirk shooting where he discussed this. He offered an example where his unit had received intel that a notorious bad guy was going to be at a certain time and place and wanted to take him out. They couldn’t do this on their own since the RoE demanded that someone display hostile intent. Basically if the guy didn’t pick up a weapon, then he wasn’t fair game. And he was leadership and not dumb, so he probably wouldn’t pick up a weapon.
They needed a declaration from higher ups, I think flag officers, that this man was to be considered hostile. With such a declaration they could engage him without him displaying any hostile intent. They ran it up the flagpole and were denied.
The Kirk link was that they accepted the decision, Americans abide rule of law, and that’s a good thing. It’s a bad thing that one guy on his own got to declare Kirk hostile and take him out.
Who should have authority to order executions? It makes sense to push that up to the higher ups. Maybe the burden of evidence could be lower if they simply wanted to arrest him, although tons of people got thrown into military prisons for no good reason in afghanistan.
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Imagine going half way around the world to someone else's home and complaining that you can't commit more war crimes against locals who never at any point asked you to be there.
The GWOT failed because they failed at building alliances with locals and getting support. Not a single Afghan wanted to defend Kabul. The Afghan national army had zero motivation and nobody in Afghanistan believed in the occupation regime. Killing more Afghans would not have strengthened their enthusiasm for a corrupt regime.
Rather than killing more villagers they would have needed troops that spent years in villages building relations with locals and working on creating alliances with local figures. More gung ho recent arrivals from Texas who are trigger happy and want to go out and slaughter locals would have turned into a Vietnam scale fiasco.
I don’t think this is responding to anything I had posted.
In the example Jocko had shared the notorious bad guy was hated by locals. He was the kind of guy who would torture and kill your whole family if he suspected you were collaborating with coalition forces.
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