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he’d summoned to Washington, D.C., has mystified and outraged critics who think his obsession with physical fitness is out-of-date at best and ridiculous at worst.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 push-ups 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.”
