On 30 September, US Secretary of War and Donald Trump crony Pete Hegseth gave an address to a massive summoned party of Generals and Flag Officers at Quantico, Virginia,where he gave his vision for re-branding the US military as a force of tough warriors. A large part of his message was a claim that “woke” management had lowered standards and that this was going to be reversed, including making female service personnel conform to the highest male physical standards and requiring all personnel to regularly pass fitness tests. He also claimed that rules against hazing were too rigid. And then he targeted “beardos”, stating:
At every level, from the Joint Chiefs to everyone in this room to the youngest private, leaders set the standard. And so many of you do this already, active, guard and reserve. This also means grooming standards. No more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards.
He had also issued some relevant memoranda dealing with these matters.
But as I understand, don’t all branches of the US military already require men to have short hair and to shave, with exemptions only given to those who suffer from Folliculitis barbae and to individuals who apply for a religious exemption (mainly Sikhs and some Jews and Muslims, exemptions which as I understand were only grudgingly given in recent years)? Other than these limited exemptions, I can’t recall ever hearing of any of Armed Services allowing beards or long hair anytime in recent history. Nor can I recall seeing a single long-haired or bearded US serviceman in any recent photo, maybe some utter exception years ago of a soldier in Afghanistan attempting to grow a beard in order to be taken seriously by the local population. So just where did Hegseth find his “beardos” among the military population in the US? I can’t seem to locate any.
Is he targeting the people who have received health or religious exemptions? One of his memos does say that those who have an exemption due to health reasons are to receive medical treatment and that if it is not possible to treat the condition within a year, separation proceedings are to be commenced. Does Hegseth consider being able to shave to be more important than to maintain the enrollment of a competent soldier in whose training the government has invested? Does he have a problem with people like Sikhs, who have been serving in various militaries and police forces with turbans and beards for decades or more, with no detriment to their service record?
Did he perhaps observe more lax grooming standards among some odd members of the National Guard whom Trump has pressed into service to harass people in major American cities of late? (The National Guard is made up of part-time, basically reservist personnel raised under state authority. I don’t know if this happens in the US, but in Canada, before the military allowed beards across the board (and eventually - in 2022 - long hair), it was not rare to see reservists with beards and sometimes longer-than-regulation hair. This was tolerated owing to them being part-time soldiers.)
Or is he going off some exceptions to the rule who find it difficult to maintain the grooming standards in field conditions? It calls to mind an incident from World War II when US Army cartoonist Bill Mauldin was chewed out by General George Patton for his cartoons in Stars and Stripes Magazine. Mauldin drew a pair of ordinary soldiers called Willie and Joe, and depicted them with grown-out hair and beards. Patton, a hard man to put things nicely, objected to Mauldin’s cartoons, the content of which he considered subversive toward officers and against military discipline, and threatened to ban Stars and Stripes from his Third Army. An interview was arranged between him and Mauldin, where Patton spent 45 minutes chewing the cartoonist out on his work; his complaints included referring to Willie and Joe as “those god-awful things you call soldiers,” who looked “like goddamn bums,” and accusing: “What are you trying to do, incite a goddamn mutiny?“ But some service personnel in tough theaters of war like Normandy or Iwo Jima would have neglected these things owing simply to tough field conditions. Is this perhaps what Hegseth had in mind?