Does the Pentagon’s Push for Higher Testosterone Signal a Coming War?

On July 15, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a social-media video captioned “The High T Department of War,” announcing that all active duty and reserve personnel aged 30 and older will be screened for testosterone deficiency as a mandatory element of their periodic health assessment, with voluntary testosterone replacement therapy offered to those found deficient. Hegseth framed the program as ensuring service members “have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight,” calling it a “sacred duty” to maintain the warfighter’s biological advantage.

Strong Fighters vs. Effeminate Subjects

The announcement is significant both as health policy and cultural signal. Writing in The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, Montesquieu documented the pattern, observing that when governments fear invasion, they want strong men. But despotic power prefers subjects who are passive, effeminate, and weak. The philosopher noted that such is the tyrant’s fear of the population, that he will promote effeminacy and vice even in the schools. It makes for bad citizens, but good slaves.

History repeats itself. During the Cold War, with the Soviet Union presenting a military threat, American culture celebrated masculine virtues: John Wayne, physical fitness programs, the warrior ethos, the explicitly masculine recruitment culture of the military, etc. The threat was real, the enemy was strong, and capable men were the cultural ideal.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the external threat dissolved, and cultural priorities shifted with remarkable speed. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed the feminization of American cultural life: the pathologization of masculine behavior in schools, the pharmaceutical management of boyhood energy through ADHD medication, the cultural celebration of androgyny, and eventually systematic gender-dysphoria brainwashing. Its effect was precisely what Montesquieu described — the systematic enervation of the male population during a period when rulers perceived no existential threat requiring their strength.

Now, with China’s military modernization targeting American power in the Pacific, Russia in its fifth year of a European land war, and Iran having consumed 80 percent of America’s long-range conventional strike capacity in six months of combat, the external threat has returned. Hegseth’s announcement comes as other officials in the current administration have begun to recognize the need for men with higher testosterone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has simultaneously moved to loosen restrictions on testosterone therapy that have been in place for decades.

Other Underlying Causes

However, Hegseth’s proposal fails to acknowledge a primary cause of low testosterone levels in American men.

Atrazine, one of the most widely used herbicides in American agriculture, is a known endocrine disruptor that contaminates groundwater. University of California Berkeley biologist Tyrone Hayes documented that atrazine chemically castrates male frogs and feminizes their reproductive biology at concentrations found in ordinary drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly delayed action on atrazine despite these findings, leaving it in the public water supply.

Soy, which contains phytoestrogens that mimic estrogen, has been systematically incorporated into the American food supply across processed foods, infant formula, and meat substitutes at levels unprecedented in the Western diet. Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates in plastics packaging further disrupt endocrine function.

The cumulative environmental estrogen load on the American male body has produced measurable results. A landmark 2007 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that testosterone levels in American men had declined by approximately one percent per year since the 1980s, independent of aging.

Addressing the Symptoms

Hegseth’s program does not name these causes. It addresses the symptom while the environmental causes remain largely unaddressed in the water supply and food system.

The men being screened for testosterone deficiency today are the product of an environment — water, food, culture — that reduced their hormone levels in ways that served the interests of compliance and management during a period of relative peace. Now those same men are being told their biology is deficient and must be corrected to meet the demands of a threat environment their managers helped create.

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