By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
Doesn’t Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth realize that push-ups are passe? His speech to an audience of generals he’d summoned to Washington, D.C., has mystified and outraged critics who think his obsession with physical fitness is out-of-date at best and ridiculous at worst.
“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth told the assembled brass. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”
“Today, at my direction, every member of the joint force, at every rank, is required to take a PT test twice a year, as well as meet height and weight requirements twice a year, every year of service,” he continued.
Cue the eye-rolling.
A piece in The Atlantic observed that Hegseth’s “dream world is the world of Ranger school” — an Army training program — “not the actual world of complex military operations involving land, air, sea, space and cyberspace.”
He was accused of fat-shaming, and the ladies on “The View” didn’t get it. Joy Behar called him out for “his very retro vision for our armed forces,” and asked, “Why is he obsessed with fat?” Her colleague Sunny Hostin chimed in, “Yeah, and fitness?”
There’s no doubt that physical fitness is very personal to Hegseth, who said the day of his confirmation hearing that he’d done five sets of 47 pushups that morning. “If the secretary of war can do regular,
hard PT, so can every member of our joint force,” he told the generals.
But you know who’d agree with him about the centrality of fitness to the military profession? The great 20th-century statesman George C. Marshall. In a 1920 letter, Marshall called being “physically strong” one of the foundations of the military profession. As he said of military leaders in 1940 congressional testimony, they have to inspire their men “when they are hungry and exhausted and desperately uncomfortable and in great danger,” and “only a man of positive characteristics of leadership, with the physical stamina that goes with it, can function under those conditions.”
Needless to say, combat is an inherently physical activity. It requires incredible exertion for long stretches of time under great stress. It is necessary to carry heavy objects — a wounded comrade, artillery shells — in the worst conditions imaginable. The age of AI and drones hasn’t changed this ineluctable fact of human existence.
It’s simply a fact that, as any platoon leader will tell you, out-of-shape infantrymen aren’t as good at their jobs.
The emphasis on fitness is especially important when the recruiting pool, reflecting an American society where 40% of people are obese, is in poorer shape than it used to be.
And troops do notice and resent it when they are meeting height and weight standards and their comrades aren’t, or when their superiors are out of shape. If the colonel who is enforcing disciplinary matters is fat, it is corrosive of his credibility.
Physical fitness standards were dumbed down over the years, and for DEI reasons.
The Army had been developing a fitness test that was supposed to have gender-neutral standards. When it emerged, not surprisingly, that women weren’t doing as well on the test, the Biden-era Army decided to gender-norm the scores and lower the standards generally.
In a telling exchange with Sen. Tom Cotton, the secretary of the Army at the time said that the Army “didn’t want to disadvantage any subgroups.”
This is why it’s so important that Hegseth ordered that the requirement for combat positions “returns to the highest male standard.”
Obviously, having a physically fit force doesn’t guarantee victory in, say, a war with China, which would require much else besides. But Hegseth was right to make it as clear as possible to our military leaders that the basics are back. Making our force more proficient doesn’t begin and end with push-ups, but
it does start there.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2025 by King Features Synd., Inc.