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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 doubt that beards in specific pose any problem. But I can easily imagine that having strict grooming and fitness standards pay dividends even if the exact contents of those standards are largely arbitrary and unimportant. If I had to make up a BS but plausible sort of justification, I imagine that these things foster a sense of pride, unity, and brotherhood as belonging to a special class, and it is not hard to imagine that such things are actually beneficial to functioning according to a sort of “broken windows” theory of organizational functioning. Like, if you can’t even hold standards around something low-cost and easy to police like hair, what hope do you have of maintaining standards that are much more critical and harder to police (like courage under fire)? Of course I have no proof it actually shakes out this way but as I said it seems plausible and directionally correct. As a civilian my impression of the military is that it is made up of mostly literal cuckolds, 4’10” fat latinas and idiots that had absolutely zero job prospects outside of what amounts to a government make-work program. They would certainly do well to start combatting that perception because I doubt I’m alone
I've gotta say the Caleb Hammer budgeting series where like half of the participants are on lifelong benefits for Military Disability has definitely colored my feelings towards US military dysgenics.
It's way more than half. I think they only recently had the first one that wasn't.
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