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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.
Tanner Greer is extremely blackpilled on this:
Greer is a major China hawk, though. And Hegseth isn't.
I believe this is part of the broader strategic posture adjustment, or at least a hedging bet (not clear if it'll be maintained). The US defense/war department, in Hegseth's vision (I don't think he's intelligent enough to have a coherent strategic vision like, say, Elbridge A. Colby, but there probably are people behind him making this functionally true), is going to implement Monroe Doctrine 2.0, focus on the Western hemisphere. Tough, masculine, no-nonsense, scary bunch, unencumbered by rules of engagement, to more easily topple regimes in South America and pressure neighbors into resource and trade concessions. Death squads eliminating suspected narcos, National Guard prepared to pacify Portland. More like Russian Airborne Forces that exist to terrorize the domestic audience. This is all, of course, noise in the context of conflicts with peer powers, which realistically mean just China and require far more logistical and industrial competence than warrior ethos or indeed individual warriors (only so many guys you can fit on an aircraft carrier). But on that level, the US will rely on strategic deterrence and the hope of transformative results from AGI.
Virtually no one in the Trump administration is. Even nominally anti-China measures are more about domestic grandstanding than effective action against China. This is a political movement that is fixated on persecuting internal enemies and shaking down allies. I know I harp on this obnoxiously, but it really is the thought process of a bully: avoid dealing with China because they're tough, prey on the people who depend on you because they can't really fight back. And of course, this thought process filters down military organizational thinking: bring back hazing, double down on the cult of special forces, etc...
It's also hard not to see some of this as the consequence of putting an infantry lieutenant in charge of the military. Some of this tough guy attitude might be tolerable or even desirable in a guy whose job is to lead 40ish other men directly into combat, but he's thinking about things from that perspective. He's not a systems-level thinker, and I find it hard to believe he ever would have made it to a senior leadership position on his merits.
a) US isn't and hasn't been in position to do anything about China and no amount of cabinet level politicking could change this. It'd required either a time machine or a 20 years preceded by a military coup and a deep program of national reform.
b) they actually need to take power inside the US because democrats have made it very clear what they intend to do.
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