Hegseth wants to provide soldiers with testosterone supplements to enhance their combat performance

Soldiers doped to fight better. You can twist the words of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s Minister of War – as he prefers to be called – any way you like. But this is essentially the gist of an announcement from the Pentagon, which will from now on carry out annual tests on servicemen’s testosterone levels and, in the event of a drop in the hormone, offer specific therapies on a voluntary basis to replace it. The tests are compulsory for all men over the age of 30; they will also be available on request for those in their twenties, whilst there is uncertainty as to what arrangements are in place for women in uniform, who are not held in high regard by Hegseth.

“We owe our service personnel the best healthcare in the world, and this programme honours that commitment,” the minister said in a video posted on the Pentagon’s social media channels. “Looking after your long-term health means ensuring you remain strong, resilient and capable – not just for your next mission, but for the rest of your life – so that you can thrive long after you’ve taken off your uniform.” The underlying idea of the programme is that every service member needs “the right levels of testosterone to perform at their best”. “This initiative,” Hegseth added, addressing all the Armed Forces, “is not about artificial enhancement; it is about restoring and optimising your natural capabilities, safeguarding your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundations necessary to sustain combat.”

The list of concerns raised by the announcement is extensive. It appears to be a standard medical initiative aimed at the physical wellbeing of soldiers, but it opens the door to historical parallels and bioethical questions that may not all be appropriate, yet are inevitable. Leaving it to doctors to assess the effectiveness of a screening programme designed to test an asymptomatic cohort across the board, as well as the consequences and contraindications of hormonal treatments, the first question concerns the Trump administration’s approach to health issues. The very same government that has an anti-vaccine Health Secretary in the form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and is full of people who do not want to be told how to treat diseases and manage epidemics has now decided to pump testosterone into the bodies of Marines. On a voluntary basis, of course: but how free is a 35-year-old sergeant in the military really to say ‘no’ when told by his superiors that it would be advisable to undergo the treatment? It will be argued that, in war, soldiers have always been ‘drugged’ – in a manner more or less coordinated from above – and that this, by contrast, is a transparent initiative with all the trappings of medicine. In fact, we are a long way from the reality of Pervitin tablets – the methamphetamine distributed on a massive scale to Wehrmacht soldiers during the 1940 campaign in France – or from the Benzedrine that circulated amongst the Allies. We are a world away from the flood of heroin and amphetamines with which American lads in uniform tried to endure the terror of the Vietnamese jungle. The testosterone treatment is also quite different from the ‘go-pills’ and ‘no-go-pills’ that the US Air Force distributed to pilots to stimulate combat readiness or to help them rest when they needed to lower their adrenaline levels. But large-scale hormone therapy aimed at boosting combat effectiveness seems to come more from an ISIS or al-Qaeda jihadist manual than from those describing Pentagon procedures.

Comparisons with the world of sport and its dark side of doping are also inevitable. One is reminded of programmes from the 1970s in the GDR, such as the infamous “Staatsplanthema 14.25”, with its blue pills handed out to thousands of athletes and passed off as vitamins or supplements. Or the Moscow laboratories that concocted steroid cocktails to give Vladimir Putin’s athletes an edge at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. ‘State-sponsored’ programmes like the Pentagon’s, with the obvious difference that Hegseth is presenting the project publicly and transparently, whilst the East Germans and the Russians did everything in secret. In general, whether or not it is to be considered doping, the Pentagon’s project highlights a widespread temptation within the Trump administration and amongst its supporters: that of viewing the human body as something to be fixed and enhanced. It is this line of thinking, with all its bioethical implications, against which the American Pope warns in "Magnifica Humanitas", when he speaks of the culture of limitation understood as a ‘flaw to be corrected’. Leo XIV writes in the encyclical: “Transhumanism envisages the enhancement of the human being through technologies (biomedicine, body engineering, devices, algorithms), with the aim of increasing performance and capabilities”. If an example were needed of how governments can put this approach into practice, the Pentagon has now provided it.