Veterans and military groups are furious after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of top military officials to a speech subjecting them to a familiar barrage of right-wing grievances about the armed forces, including new guidance that could effectively exclude women from combat roles.
Hegseth raged against “woke garbage” and “stupid rules of engagement” that he claims are unjustly restraining service members. He also smeared transgender service members as “dudes in dresses” and announced plans to roll back troops’ abilities to report unequal treatment based on race, gender, sexuality or religion, making it easier for personnel to bully and haze service members without consequence.
Women serving in combat roles must meet the “highest male standard,” and if not, “it’s time for a new position or a new profession,” Hegseth said.
“If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is,” he said. “If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it.”
Women veterans have “served on the front lines, met every challenge, and proven our mettle overseas and in combat,” said Marine veteran Jojo Sweat, the national organizing director for progressive veterans advocacy group Common Defense.
“Your new ‘highest male standard’ for fitness tests doesn’t restore readiness — it erases the contributions of thousands of us who have fought, led, and sacrificed alongside our brothers in arms,” she told The Independent.
“This rollback to outdated norms ignores decades of evidence that diverse, capable forces win battles,” she said.
Air Force veteran Gretchen Klingler, director of Veterans for American Ideas at Human Rights First, said the event “made it clear that this administration is working toward remaking our military into [a] politicized force, devoid of the democratic ideals that have historically made the United States strong.”
“Hegseth’s antipathy toward service women and diversity as a whole is more than reprehensible; it is dangerous,” she told The Independent.
Hegseth’s remarks, followed by an address from President Donald Trump, were delivered to a rare assembly of military leadership ordered to Virginia from across the globe on short notice.
The secretary had previously faced an avalanche of criticism from women service members and veterans for explicitly stating that the nation’s armed forces “should not have women in combat roles” and that men are “more capable” in those positions. Last year, he told right-wing media personality Ben Shapiro that women are “life-givers, not life-takers,” who could be “medics or helicopter pilots or whatever.”
The Defense Department opened all combat roles to women in 2016. Women now make up roughly 17 percent of the nation’s active-duty forces and more than 21 percent of the selected reserve, according to the Pentagon. In 2022, as the overall number of service members dropped by 2.7 percent from the previous year, the percentage of women service members had increased.
Hegseth — a former Fox News personality who commands a massive defense budget and roughly 3 million service members and personnel serving in the nation’s oldest-running agency while the country is embroiled in global conflicts in a period of escalating tensions — has ushered in an era of “war fighter” culture informed by Trump’s grievance-fueled agenda since taking office.
Army Major General Ret. Paul Eaton, senior adviser for veterans political advocacy group VoteVets, said he is “saddened” by the idea that ranking leaders are being subjected to “such clueless, self-aggrandizing civilian leadership.”
“At a time when American families — military families included — are struggling with exploding inflation, Pete Hegseth spent millions to fly in all of our generals and admirals to rant about facial hair and brag about how many pull-ups he can do, and have Donald Trump sleepwalk through a list of partisan gripes,” he said in a statement to The Independent.
“These are not serious people and they are making us less secure — not more lethal,” he said.
Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the event an “expensive, dangerous dereliction of leadership by the Trump administration.”
“By dismissing and marginalizing servicemembers who do not fit his narrow vision, Hegseth insulted those who serve honorably and eroded the cohesion that makes our military strong,” he said.
In rambling remarks to top military officials that spanned more than an hour, Trump suggested that U.S. cities would be “training grounds” for active-duty troops for combat against his ideological opponents that the president labeled “the enemy within” waging a “war” against the country from inside.
Trump’s “reckless suggestion” is a “dangerous assault on our democracy, treating our own communities as war zones and our citizens as enemies,” according to Reed.
The president’s rhetoric is “authoritarian and un-American at its very core,” Klingler told The Independent.
“Our top generals and admirals have witnessed throughout their careers what this kind of rhetoric means in nations across the world, and we are now seeing it at home,” she said.
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine veteran, said the remarks amounted to “weak portrayals of ‘leadership’ by two small, insecure men.”
“U.S. cities should never be ‘training grounds’ for the military,’ he said. “There is no ‘enemy from within.’ The reputational and operational damage being done to our military will take years to undo.”
