Pete Hegseth is screening soldiers for testosterone while their communities eat cuts.
The defense secretary announced Wednesday that the Department of Defense will test every soldier over thirty for testosterone deficiency. Annual health assessments will include hormone panels. Treatment, he said in a video posted to X, ensures service members have “the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.” Meanwhile, the man running the Pentagon is proposing troop reductions, blocking officer promotions, and reviewing how much of the American commitment to Europe to pare away.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but when the secretary of defense announces that the military’s top health priority is the hormone levels of thirty-year-old men, you are looking at a man who has confused the Pentagon with a wellness podcast — while the real material concerns of soldiers and their families go unaddressed.
The soldier over thirty that Hegseth wants to screen for testosterone is the same soldier whose career is stalled because this defense secretary personally blocked nine Air Force colonel promotions and delayed dozens more. That is not an abstraction. A captain pinned at O-3 for an extra year is a family that does not get the raise that comes with the next rank. It is a mortgage payment that stays harder. It is a spouse who put off finishing a degree because the PCS move the promotion required never came. When Hegseth blocks promotions, he is freezing the earning trajectories of working families, and the men and women downstream of that bottleneck are not interchangeable with the podcast audience he is performing for.
The communities where these soldiers live feel it too. The base towns of America — places like Fort Stewart outside Hinesville, Georgia, or Fort Campbell straddling the Kentucky-Tennessee line — are not strategy papers. They are towns where the auto shops and the diners and the school systems depend on a garrison economy. When a defense secretary proposes troop cuts and reviews force posture reductions, the second-order effect lands on the barber who cuts a soldier’s hair, the landlord who rents to a junior NCO, the parts counter where the supply clerk’s husband works. The Pentagon calls these things “force structure adjustments.” The people who live in those towns call it getting squeezed.
And what does Hegseth offer the working soldier and the working community instead of career stability and predictable postings? Testosterone screening. A hormone panel.
The research is clear about where this program comes from. A study published in Social Science and Medicine documents that young men are being aggressively targeted online by wellness influencers promoting hormone tests and treatments as essential to being a “real man,” despite screening for low testosterone being medically unwarranted in most people in this age group. Health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who has promoted his own testosterone injections as part of a personal “anti-aging regimen,” has been pushing the same “low T crisis” narrative without evidence. The Pentagon is now formalizing influencer health culture as military medical policy, and the working soldier is the test subject.
What Hegseth is not measuring is what the force actually needs. FM 7-22, the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness manual, covers physical readiness, nutritional readiness, mental readiness, sleep readiness, and spiritual readiness. The readiness reporting system measures equipment availability, personnel fill rates, training proficiency, and deployment readiness. Testosterone level does not appear in any of them. What does appear is the soldier-to-slot fill rate — which is declining because this secretary proposes cuts. What does appear is retention — which falls when mid-career NCOs and captains watch their promotions get frozen while the man responsible talks about hormone levels. What does appear is the ratio of deployed days to reset days — which Hegseth is making worse by threatening further European drawdowns while Ukraine burns.
This is what austerity looks like when it wears a flag pin. The mechanism is plain. The budget shrinks, the personnel cuts follow, and a phony wellness initiative provides the rhetorical cover. The soldier does not get the career. The family does not get the stability. The base town does not get the economic continuity. But the secretary gets a video clip about “lethality” and “maximum psychological readiness” that sounds exactly like the influencer content feeding the testosterone-supplement market.
The working-class soldiers I am talking about are not the ones whose fathers run for office. They are the men and women from the towns where the recruiter’s office in the strip mall is the only path to the GI Bill. They are the ones who enlist because a base posting means a steady paycheck and Tricare for the kids and a shot at a VA home loan. When the defense secretary freezes their promotions and screens their hormones instead of securing their careers, he is not keeping them on “the leading edge of lethality.” He is managing their bodies while neglecting their lives.
The priorities a defense secretary who actually cared about working soldiers would address are plain. Unblock the promotion bottleneck so career families can plan their lives. Stop reviewing how much of the European commitment to cut while the war in Ukraine continues. Retain the mid-career NCOs and captains the force cannot replace. Shore up the base towns where American working families depend on the garrison economy. Fund the VA so the soldiers who come home after twenty years of these policies have healthcare that works.
None of that is testosterone. All of it is material. And the soldier Hegseth is performing for deserves better than being the test subject for a policy imported from the same influencer ecosystem that sells supplements to men who do not need them.