As the United States and Iran traded deadly strikes last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a war-time order to the troops: Service members 30 and over would have their testosterone levels checked.
Those found lacking would be offered hormone replacement therapy — Hegseth’s way of “ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight,” as he put it.
The prospect of free testosterone no doubt came as a great relief to those in harm’s way. It promised to be the most important contribution to public health since 2022, when Tucker Carlson, then Hegseth’s Fox News colleague, proposed that men should raise their testosterone levels by exposing their male parts to red lights in a process he called “testicle tanning.”
Still, after watching Hegseth’s testimony before the Senate on Tuesday, I can’t help wondering whether the problem isn’t that our troops have too little testosterone but that our secretary of “war” (as he insists on being called) has too much.
High levels of testosterone in men, according to Harvard Medical School, can cause “aggressive behavior” as well as “irritability,” “impaired judgment” and “delusions.”
I’m not qualified to diagnose Hegseth (and he has yet to provide me with a blood sample), but the man I saw taking questions from the Appropriations Committee appeared to be laboring under the delusion that the Iran war has been a roaring success, and he had the questionable judgment to attack the senators — the very people he was asking for more money to spend on the war — in the most aggressive and irritable terms.
“You won’t show any political courage to actually fund our department because you have Trump derangement syndrome!” he testified.
He denounced the “hypocrisy” of senators on both sides and lambasted “Democrats who won’t fund the troops, who stand and play partisan politics.”
He accused those who challenged him as “reckless” and “irresponsible” and said their criticism “smears the sacrifice of the troops.”
“We’re staying laser focused on the objective, and you’re trying to make campaign commercials,” he lectured one lawmaker.
“Do you want radical Islamists to have a nuclear bomb that can stare down the world?” he demanded of another.
“President Trump deserves the kind of praise he should get for undertaking this effort, having the courage to ensure that crazy Islamists can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
“Shame on you.”
Possibly he should ease up on the red-light therapy.
The thing that provoked Hegseth’s aggression: Democrats kept asking him about his various claims of victory in Iran. “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory by any measure,” Hegseth said at the start of the now-defunct ceasefire. “Epic Fury decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come.”
Now the war is back on, the Strait of Hormuz is closed again, the regime remains in place, and the nuclear question is still unresolved. Tragically, 18 American troops have died, and 100 were injured in recent days alone. The administration, meanwhile, is asking for $67 billion in extra military spending in addition to its $1.5 trillion proposed annual military budget.
And Hegseth? He fights culture wars expertly, attacking “woke” policies and “fat generals.” He scoffs at war-crimes allegations and prays for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” He’s effectively banished reporters from the Pentagon and eliminated public briefings. His frat-boy rule famously included sharing sensitive war plans on Signal, complete with emojis.
But when it comes to leading an actual war, it turns out Hegseth is not so adept. Instead of showing some war-time leadership, he came to the Senate and tried to blame his problems on the Biden administration.
“As the direct result of neglected priorities and gross negligence that ignored threats left over from the previous administration, President Trump inherited a set of global and domestic crises, deferred maintenance almost across the board,” he said in his opening statement. “Instead of steering the ship through gathering storms, former leaders let our military languish through social experiments and globalist appeasement — sheer weakness.”
By contrast, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, giving his opening statement right after Hegseth, was a class act. He opened by saying the names of the three Americans just killed in the Iran war, and he offered condolences to the senators on the death of their colleague Lindsey Graham. “I acknowledge the environment we all serve in,” Caine said, “but always remember that we are all Americans with deep and abiding love of our nation and our military service members and their families.”
It was moving — and effective. But Hegseth must have thought that to be a Low-T approach, because he continued throughout the hearing to blame Biden — who left office 13 months before Trump launched the Iran war.
Asked about the immediate needs of the troops in the $67 billion request, Hegseth complained that “it was not a priority to fund the Department of Defense under Joe Biden.” Challenged further about the contents of the Pentagon’s new request, he attacked “the gross negligence and neglect of the Biden administration.” Presented with a substantive accounting question, Hegseth testified: “I don’t know what [Biden Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin did for four years. I really don’t. The amount of neglect, the amount of stale thinking and bureaucracy was staggering when we took over.”
The same thing happened several more times.
“Your fallback to the Biden administration is just a very obvious excuse for … gross negligence,” Sen. Jack Reed, a pro-military Rhode Island Democrat, told Hegseth. “You did not fully inform the president that you would be in a situation where the Strait of Hormuz could be effectively closed, oil prices could surge, and effectively the Iranians could maintain their ability to strike back as they are right now.”
The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett this week wrote a piece about the videos Hegseth posts of his exercise sessions with troops — widely ridiculed because they show him kicking his legs to do a pull-up or bench-pressing without fully extending his arms. Various “military fitness experts” confirmed that Hegseth was cutting corners and using poor form.
But his corner-cutting and poor form isn’t limited to his exercise routine.
When Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, pressed him on the War Powers Resolution, he admitted he hadn’t done his homework: “We’ll get back to you with our views on that.” Midway through his testimony, he revised his explanation of unspent Pentagon funds: “I was sort of updated.” Presumably the update came from one of the 26 people (by my count) in his entourage. Caine, by contrast, came with just a few aides.
Committee Chair Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, delivered a powerful opening statement, noting a report that more than half of the senior officers purged by Hegseth have been female or Black. “I find this deeply troubling,” she said. “These are men and women who volunteered to serve our country and swore an oath to support and defend our Constitution.”
But Hegseth couldn’t be bothered to sit in the room for her statement. He waited in a holding room until his turn came. Collins seemed surprised to discover he was absent, and, even when she called him to the witness table, he didn’t enter the room for a full minute after Caine did.
“Well, leave it to our military witness to be on time,” Collins quipped.
That, Mr. Secretary, is poor form.
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