For the Smallest Men in the World
And a celebration of them.
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About eleven years ago, I was closing in on my undergraduate degree at Georgetown University using my G.I. Bill benefits (thank you, American taxpayers), and I got into an argument with a fellow veteran during an evening class discussion over women in combat roles.
I forget how the subject initially came up, but someone else had offered that women should be permitted to attend Ranger School, the U.S. Army’s premier combat leadership course.
This observation pissed off my fellow veteran, and before I knew it, we got into a heated argument right there in the middle of class.
When I pointed out that although most women (and most men) couldn’t hack Ranger School, there were surely some women who could pass the grueling standards of the course, he responded with exasperation: “Oh, c’mon!”
This was otherwise a calm and collected man. We had thoughtful conversations all throughout the semester, but it was this topic—and this topic alone—that infuriated him to the point of shouting.
At the time, I naïvely thought that he genuinely didn’t think women could compete with men in combat courses. In the years since, I can’t help but think it was less about standards and more about the voluntarily emasculated feelings of some men when confronted with the reality that some women have the capacity and skill to do what most men cannot.
He never attended Ranger School, and had he done so, statistics were not on his side regarding the prospect of success. So, if a woman graduated from Ranger School and earned her coveted Ranger Tab, what would that say about him?
Less than a year after that argument, Captain Kristen Griest and 1st Lieutenant Shaye Haver became the first women to earn their Tabs. They did so while meeting the same exact standards as their male peers. They did so under a grading system that relied, in part, on peer evaluations, meaning that the approval of their male classmates was essential to graduating.
Two months later, they were joined by Major Lisa Jaster—a 37-year-old Army Reserve engineer officer and mother of two—the first woman in the Army Reserve to accomplish the feat (an uncommon feat for any Army Reserve soldier).
In the ten years since these three women earned their Tabs, more than 150 women have joined this exclusive club, all meeting the same high standards as the men alongside them, all doing so not out of personal glory but fidelity to their oath as soldiers.
Many other changes have taken place in that time.
In January of 2016, the repeal of the combat exclusion ban for women was fully implemented, opening all military occupational specialties to women for the first time.
Six months later, the ban on transgender service members was first lifted; by this time, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—the policy effectively banning lesbian, gay, and bisexual service members—had been in effect for more than four years.
By 2018, all service branches had implemented new policies permitting Black women to wear certain natural hairstyles, which had been previously and ludicrously banned under the bizarre grooming regulations up to that point.
By 2023, all service branches had implemented some degree of new policies permitting shaving waivers for service members with pseudofolliculitis barbae (PFB), a medical condition causing severe razor bumps that disproportionately affects Black men.
That same year, all branches had come into compliance permitting the wearing of turbans, hijabs, and beards for religious reasons, allowing Sikh and Muslim service members to serve honorably in uniform within strict grooming standards.
In the history of our Armed Forces, only ten women have officially risen to the rank of four-star general or admiral, most of them in the past decade — and half of them in the past four years, including Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who became the first woman to serve as Chief of Naval Operations (the top U.S. Navy officer) in 2023, making her also the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The long overdue changes being made to our military were still too fast and too frightening and too insulting for some straight white men in our country, most of whom haven’t served in uniform a day in their lives but had always taken a very curious pride in our military being (in their minds) the last bastion of white male excellence.
These mediocre men could stomach seeing other white men accomplish what they could not. That somehow felt fair. But they could not bear seeing women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and some religious minorities not just be accepted in the ranks but excel while being held to the same high standards.
Trump’s reelection brought the promise of salving their insecurities. They had no evidence to support the ludicrous assertion that our military has somehow been made weaker by all these changes, nor was that ever the point.
What they wanted was a military that didn’t remind them that people who don’t look like them were serving with honor and excellence in ways they could not — or declined to.
Something had to be done. Their feelings needed to be salvaged. Merit and standards needed to be replaced by comforting images of only straight white men in power.
The past nine months have been a whirlwind of rollbacks in service to their hurt feelings. On the same day, a month after he took office, Trump removed Air Force General C. Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — and Admiral Franchetti from her role as Chief of Naval Operations.
No reason was given for their removal. Both were only 16 months into their posts, which typically last four years. Both were replaced by white male officers. Both were basically forced into early retirement.
Admiral Linda Fagan, Commandant of the Coast Guard, had been removed by Trump the day after his inauguration. Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, U.S. Military Representative to NATO, was removed in April. Vice Admiral Yvette Davids, the first woman and Hispanic service member to serve as Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, was removed from that position only 18 months into an expected three-year tenure.
In all cases, either no real explanations were given for their removal or the explanations offered were murky and dubious at best.
The trans ban was, of course, reinstated by Trump a week after he took office. With zero credible evidence to support his executive order claiming they failed to meet high standards, five thousand honorably serving trans service members were given a deadline to accept early discharge from the ranks or risk their benefits while waiting for the Supreme Court to decide their fate in the near future.
Earlier this month, Trump, who campaigned on keeping the United States out of wars, renamed the Department of Defense to the “Department of War” — although not really because that would technically take an Act of Congress, so his executive order refers to the name as a “secondary designation” (I’m not kidding).
Then came today’s latest clown move in Dollar Store Fascism. Pete Hegseth, television personality and Trump’s Defense Secretary, ordered most of the upper half of all available generals and admirals in the Armed Forces to report to a “closed-door gathering” on Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia with no advance information on the reason.
It’s unconfirmed how many general and admirals (along with their senior enlisted advisors) were in attendance, but some reports have said as many as 400, many of them traveling quite some distance from their official command and staff duties. There are close to a thousand generals and admirals in the U.S. military from one-star and up. Those in attendance were primarily the more senior officers.
It was an unprecedented order because it would typically be seen by top government officials as unnecessary and deeply reckless. A great way to put our national security at risk is announcing to the world—and all hostile nations—that you’re gathering the bulk of our senior military leadership in the same space at the same time on a specific date.
It was an attempt at a pure mafia move. An insecure show of power by an insecure administration that is privately loathed by many of the generals and admirals who were in attendance. It was a cheap imitation of Tony Soprano if the fictional New Jersey mob boss had been a complete idiot.
Hegseth, who unintentionally gave the appearance of someone who had just taken a bump of cocaine backstage (I’m sure he did no such thing), told the assembled generals and admirals that big changes were coming.
He leaned into the typical “war-fighting” and “warrior ethos” themes that sound like corporate pablum coming out of his mouth. He referenced the Roman Empire within the first minute of his remarks, which was more than likely a red meat bit for Trump’s white nationalist supporters, who revere Rome as the foundation of western values and steadfastly ignore that it was the Romans who executed Christ for treason.
He literally fat-shamed the generals and admirals in attendance, announced there would be imminent, new grooming standards regarding beards (an implicit reference to Black men and some religious minorities in the ranks), and talked of new physical fitness standards that would remove gender from the equation, which any adult with common sense could read as an effort to cull women from the ranks.
I have long believed that women and men in uniform should, in fact, be held to the same physical fitness standards but with a reasonable framework that takes into account the whole of physical fitness excellence, including flexibility, dexterity, and benchmarks that align to the greater whole.
A military IT specialist or military lawyer or whomever should be physically fit, but I care less about their ability to break records on an obstacle course than I do their effectiveness in cyber security and international law.
That’s not what Hegseth wants. He desires to see women barred from combat and ultimately kicked out of the ranks entirely. I know this because he has literally expressed this view in the past. His framework for universal physical standards isn’t about lethality; it’s about creating a vehicle for flushing women out of the military.
In probably the most cringey portion of his remarks, Hegseth opined:
And since waging war is so costly in blood and treasure, we owe our republic a military that will win any war we choose or any war that is thrust upon us. Should our enemies choose foolishly to challenge us, they will be crushed by the violence, precision and ferocity of the War Department. In other words, to our enemies, FAFO.
If necessary, our troops can translate that for you.
FAFO means “fuck around, find out,” which is what you might expect from an angry teenager imagining what they would say while addressing top military brass, not the reasonable, adult leader of the Defense Department.
That last bit—“our troops can translate that for you”—was a spot of embarrassing pandering to Trump’s base about elitism because Hegseth is just one of the boys, you know? Just a good ole boy from the working class ranks. Not a Princeton-educated ROTC grad from a middle class family.
For their part, the generals and admirals sat stoney-faced and silent. Hegseth had clearly been hoping for applause with the cringey “FAFO” line but was greeted with perplexed silence by the gathered brass. In fact, the reaction of the military’s top leadership was closer to that of a morgue after business hours.
While some of that can explained by the discipline and conditioning of military officers who have long understood to keep still during political speeches, it was still far too quiet and staid given the surroundings. These generals and admirals understood they could have applauded his remarks without fear of retribution, and they clearly chose, en masse, not to do so.
They knew it was not really a briefing. It was an attempt at a political rally. They knew the intended audience were not them, the generals and admirals who had served with honor for decades sitting before Hegseth. The intended audience were Trump’s mediocre supporters who are furious at the elites and blame everyone who doesn’t look like them for their own mediocrity.
Trump’s approval numbers are way down. The economy is anemic. Epstein hangs like a dark cloud over the administration. Hegseth has been consistently criticized for his irresponsible actions all year and privately bashed for his incompetence by top officials and aides at the Pentagon in leaks to reporters.
This performance was done in the hopes of reminding most of Trump’s supporters why they voted for him in the first place: to remove everything and anything that makes them uncomfortable and reminds them of their personal failures. It was done to rekindle and enable their resentment at a system that has always catered to them but somehow still couldn’t adequately compensate for their shortcomings and magically wand them into success.
It was an intended realization of the wet dream of a particular kind of middle-aged straight, white guy in our country who has read way too much Tom Clancy but never actually served and has always wanted a Daddy to come along and tell them their lack of success is not their fault and the success of women and people of color and queer folks in the military is unearned.
That was the whole point of the event. It had nothing to do with improving our national security and military readiness. It was a role-play session for undeserving straight, white guys who could never hack it and resent those who could.
It was a celebration of the smallest men in the world, and by that measure, it was wildly successful.
And the rest of us will be picking up the pieces for a long time to come.
It's clear that Trump, his Cabinet, advisors and the GOP are imploding in real time. It's all crumbling and they don't understand why, and they can't stop it. Unfortunately, they're causing so much damage to the people, including those who voted for them. This essay also clearly explains why, given two different opportunities, the US would not elect a woman President. I'm 74 and I'll continue to hope that we do finally elect a woman President before I die.
Small is exactly how Hegseth must have appeared to those military luminaries in that room. That the generals, admirals, and noncommissioned officers had to sit there listening to Hegseth and Trump spew their nonsense is utterly shameful. The men and women sitting quietly in the audience were so many levels above those two jokers on the stage in their patriotism and fidelity to the Constitution, Hegseth and Trump must have seemed like specks of dust.