There were, however, three VIPs in the balcony who deviated substantially from Hegseth’s criteria: Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, and Newt Gingrich, the odd trio entrusted to co-direct “Project Meridian," a new task force focused on the achievement of “absolute technological superiority” across the Pentagon. Their remit, and collective appearance, imbued Hegseth's performance with an ironic tension. After all, according to Hegseth’s own framework, Luckey is a beardo, Musk is a weirdo, and Gingrich, for his part, is no powerlifter.
More substantially, though, their mission calls to mind a future that exclusively relies on nerds and robots to wage warfare. AI, in other words, is coming for the commandos. Hegseth’s enduring commitment to old-school masculine tropes seems at once a cynical gambit to recruit strapping young men into an institution for which physical strength might become increasingly irrelevant, and an illustration of the psychic hang-ups Hegseth himself appears to have inherited in the force.
The Pentagon has long touted its ability to strengthen the country’s youth, with one representative military advert from the 20th century pledging to build muscle on the “hollow-chested boy.” A century later, in a 2010 sociological study, a pack of ROTC cadets and enlisted personnel hailed the benefits of a military body, including one who, during his interview, flexed his bicep and said “pah-pow.” As a boy, Hegseth grappled with self-perceived inadequacies. As I discovered while reporting my own book about masculinity and the military, America’s traditional soldier archetype is intoxicating but ultimately false, and fleeting, its building blocks meted out in small doses by men in power, who, for institutional purposes, withhold unconditional acceptance and always demand more. At the same time, military life can harden the body while neglecting the soul, forming a warped worldview that prescribes force as the answer to life’s problems.
A belief in military virtues has long seemed to animate Hegseth, who trained as a cub troop in college before enduring real combat conditions in the Middle East and then graduating to Fox News, where he played a war hero on television. Before Hegseth landed on the front lines, there were signs he was obsessed with proving his masculine bona fides. In 2001, as a Princeton sophomore, he joined Army ROTC, where, according to the student newspaper, he masterminded a new training lab: live-fire paintball fights in the woods on campus.
Hegseth also participated in a dueling society, where, clad in a genteel dress shirt and tie, he once fired a paintball into the crotch of a Princeton College Democrat. Hegseth matched his public shows of force with what he later described as the role of an aggressive "social conservative warrior" on campus. He went after things he deemed soft or weak, be it a campus production of The Vagina Monologues or Princeton students calling for restraint after 9/11, a stance he ridiculed as “cowardice masquerading as conscience.” Hegseth fashioned himself the alpha antidote to this soft progressivism.
This stance was solidified at 19, when a stoic Vietnam veteran looked Hegseth dead in the eye and said, “Whatever you do, don’t miss your war.” Hegseth later wrote that this order “ricocheted around my brain like a stray bullet.” But his grandiose dreams of service were soon tempered by the realities of modern warfare. He’s described his first deployment, to Guantánamo Bay starting in 2004, as mindless and boring. Afterward, he reached out to his former platoon trainer from the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course at Fort Benning to secure a hardcore deployment with a legendary company.
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