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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.
It's an odd example of how fashion turns. Beards were nearly extinct when I was a kid, became more common among Red Tribers largely as something perceived as manly-man and as part of a "warrior ethos," and now are being cracked down to promote a "warrior ethos."
Personally, I like no-beard policies because a no-beard policy makes for easier to enforce aesthetic standards than a neatly-trimmed-beard policy. The ideal policy is something like: no-beard or neatly-groomed-facial-hair as looks best on the individual > no facial hair policy > anything goes. There's a lot of guys that either can't grow a good looking beard (neckbeard, scraggly, gaps, whispy, etc) or won't choose to (stupid, lack taste). While I'd have no inherent aesthetic objection to a military of men with proper beards, we really can't have a military of men with whispy pedo-staches, neckbeards, foot long Gandalf locks, or whispy pseudo-amish long goatees. It's undignified, it looks bad, it's disreputable, it reduces uniformity and the sense that a soldier is a soldier is a soldier. It is much tougher to enforce "hey private your beard looks like shit you need to shave" than it is to enforce "everyone needs to shave" because the former is personal and specific, and I'm not sure the average officer is equipped mentally to enforce aesthetic standards anyway.
The military (by its own standards) already has a swath of pedo stache looking dudes because it's the only facial hair the system allows. I'd much sooner be in favor of the Canadian "try your facial hair, and if it doesn't look like shit we'll allow it" system. Or none at all, I don't really care. If Hegseth held a principle like you describe, he'd ban all facial hair in the military tomorrow, and also not be covered in tattoo sleeves that make him sound a lot more hypocritical.
The fact is this is another example of the Trump regime using the good will of the voter base (i.e. "please god i'm so sick of neoliberal hell") to make a wildly low-benefit change that burns a ton of that good will.
This is one of the most universally unpopular moves in the military I've seen. Everyone I know regardless of political affiliation is reacting with confusion and annoyance and stress at this change, and all it does is make people think of politics daily, rather than having it be a secondary background thing (apart from force posturing). And when your only concept of "what is the president that is technically my boss doing" is "he's flying a bunch of generals around at huge cost, pomp, and circumstance to talk about how gay beards are, which is going to get a bunch of people around me fired", that's the dominant concept.
So an obvious way to observe the credibility-burning you're claiming would be Hegseth's unpopularity with the troops, right?
Yes, undoubtedly. Most troops I know are relatively to very conservative, and the reactions range from confusion to derision to anger. Every move by SECDEF, or rather, SECOW, has been highly visible with little to no benefit to troops, and that includes the warfighters who want to get shit done. Even amongst the strongest of conservatives, the sentiment is "I get where he's coming from, but he's doing it terribly".
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