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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.
I wonder if there is a divide on the right between those who say “the problem in Afghanistan was only that we just didn’t kill enough people” and those who take the Tucker Carlson paleo con / isolationist view that we need to get out of these foreign wars.
As others have said, this is a specific thing about Muslims from a guy who really doesn’t seem to like them, based on my impression of him. Not that I expect there are many Muslims in the US military, and those there are are surely assimilated enough to be fully on board with being deployed to the Middle East in service of US foreign policy goals (and so less likely to require a beard).
I think a lot of people are just plain embarassed by their country's inability to do anything of note in those foreign
warsmilitary-humanitarian aid missions. They might be fine with staying out of there and they would be fine with going there and getting things done, but going there, being unable to say what you're trying to do, wasting time and money and then going home to see a house of cards immediately collapse is just profoundly unsatisfying.There's a glimmer of that, but it's hard for me to shake the impression that a lot of it is just a certain naive faith in the efficacy of brutality. It's also why get people proposing things like bombing drug cartels or sending the military in to fight crime, why you have an entire American film genre whose recurring central theme boils down to "police brutality is good", why back in 2003 you had people bragging we were going to turn Iraq into a parking lot, why you have people who think hazing is good, etc...
The failures in the GWOT make these types angry and frustrated because it contradicts their desire for decisive, dominating wins, but the tolerance/appetite for violence predated those failures.
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