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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 a very inside-baseball military fashion debate. Muslims in some countries like Afghanistan don’t respect men without beards. They think it looks effeminate. To assist with winning hearts and minds and blending in with the locals, special forces units and CIA Special Activities Division operators started wearing long beards like Afghani tribesmen. The problem is that when a crack elite secret unit of secret and elite crack operators starts wearing beards, everyone in the regular army is going to want to wear a beard because of the cachet and cool factor. But if you let that happen pretty soon regular army units are going to start looking like an episode of Duck Dynasty and grooming and discipline standards will go to hell. This isn’t about secretly forcing out black or Sikh soldiers, it’s about stopping posers. Hegseth made this explicit, during his speech he said “if you want to wear a beard, join the special forces!” This kind of thing has already happened many times before: tucking your pants into your boots is a fiercely guarded privilege that only paratroopers can exercise. During the American Civil War and the European Victorian era, some special units got to wear a fez.
I have to laugh because otherwise I'd cry. Baudrillard was right and I hate him for it.
Just to be clear, here's what happened:
A certain subset of Americans decided that the military banning beards was racist. Afghan tribespeople think people without beards aren't men. American soldiers think beards are for cool elite people.
Does anyone else feel a deep despair at this? Or is it just me? I don't want the desert of the real either, but is the endpoint of this just complete breakdown in shared language and everyone just chucking rocks to see if they have the power to enforce their meaning?
It was ever thus. in 1802 if your unit dressed in buckskins like an American Indian, it symbolized that you were an elite ranger. The paratroopers that jumped into Brittany during the D-Day invasion shaved their hair into Mohawks and painted their faces with Iroquois war paint. MAC-V SOG units in Vietnam wore the Mohawk also (that’s what Travis Bickle’s hair in Taxi Driver is a reference to, in Paul Schrader’s original script he was a former Green Beret). Special units always try to aesthetically distinguish themselves from the rank and file, and taking on the characteristics of former defeated enemies is often a way to do that. In the 19th and 20th centuries that was the aesthetics of an Indian brave; in the 21st it’s the keffiyeh and beard of an afghani mujahideen.
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