What Does a "Warrior" Look Like?

Trump, Hegseth, and the "straight from central casting" obsession.

Whatever else you may think of Pete Hegseth, he certainly is “straight from central casting,” to use Donald Trump’s highest praise.

The square jaw. The bulging, tattooed muscles. The trim waist. The six-pack. If you were casting the part of a badass Secretary of Defense in a classic action movie, would you cast Pete Hegseth? Of course you would. He looks exactly like what we imagine a “warrior” — his favourite word — should look like.

Which says so much about American culture and what it imagines a soldier should be.

Have a look at the following photograph.

What do those three look like?

Warehouse clerks? Off-duty caddies, maybe? Or perhaps they come from good families and they are junior lawyers dreaming of making partner and getting a membership in the country club.

Those men are U.S. Marines during the Second World War. And not just any Marines. They are Raiders — men given specialized training, the best equipment, and orders to carry out butcher-and-bolt sneak attacks on lightly defended islands held by the Japanese. The assault on Makin Island was a model Raider assault.

No square jaws. No bulging muscles. Not a tattoo in sight. The kid in the middle looks like he should be a soda jerk in Bedford Falls. “Say, Mr. Bailey,” he says. “what can I get ya?”

If you were casting a movie about World War Two-era Marine Raiders, would you cast those guys? No. You wouldn’t give them half a second’s consideration.

Speaking of Jimmy Stewart, here he is in that era.

Sure, he’s handsome enough. But he’s skinny as a straw. Would you cast that as your “warrior”? Of course not.

Jimmy Stewart didn’t play warriors. John Wayne did. But when the war broke out, Wayne stayed home while Stewart abandoned Hollywood celebrity to become a bomber pilot. He flew 20 missions over Germany, was decorated, and finished the war a colonel. He went on to become a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve.

Here’s another photo.

Imagine you’re casting a movie about Second World War commandos. Would you cast this lot?

Maybe they could play the company typist, a bartender, and two drivers. But commandos? In battle? Hardly.

But they are commandos. Specifically, they are members of Britain’s Commandos, a unit created in 1940 to carry out the most dangerous raids. (You can read more about those men and the stories behind that photo here.)

Now how about these guys?

They may look like young dads taking a break from mowing the lawn but these decidedly unmuscular dudes are US Marines — the guys who fought their way through one hellhole after another in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War.

Now let’s consider a photo where everyone has shirts on.

Imagine your movie is about a big Second World War battle. The warriors win. The heroes muster to receive congratulations from the general.

Would you cast these guys as your warriors?

No. In fact, you’d be pissed off at the casting agency for sending this sorry-looking bunch. The guy with the officer’s cap looks like an English teacher. Or maybe an accountant.

Those men are SAS.

The Special Air Service was created by Commandos who thought raids with several hundred lightly armed men were too easy. The SAS formed units as small as four soldiers each. They lived in the deserts of North Africa and conducted nighttime raids on Nazi airbases. After the Nazis had been cleared out of North Africa, the SAS joined the invasion of Italy. The photo above was taken immediately after the men pictured had conducted an amphibious landing in the Italian town of Termoli, wiped out the German paratroopers defending it, then beat back a German counterattack.

I could go on. And on.

In the Second World War, there was a kid named Murphy who stood only five feet five inches tall and weighed 112 pounds. Even by the standards of a scrawnier age, that was too scrawny for the military, so when Murphy tried to enlist in the Marines, he was rejected. The Navy rejected him, too. As did the Army Paratroopers. Finally, he applied to the regular Army and was accepted — which turned out to be a good thing because Audie Murphy went on to personally kill 241 enemy soldiers and become the most-decorated soldier in American history.

I’ll stop now. I think you get the point.

“Straight from central casting” means “you are the spitting image of the stereotype in my head.” It’s all about outward appearances and prejudice. And thanks to the explosive growth of weightlifting in modern culture, and the routine use of buff actors in models in pop culture, we collectively share images of what it means to be tough and strong that are as crude and dumb as the crudest and dumbest comic book.

To see how new and strange our modern mental images of strong men really are, consider Johnny Weissmuller. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was famous as the actor who played Tarzan, swinging shirtless around the jungle looking buff and manly.

That casting made perfect sense.

Weissmuller had won multiple gold medals for swimming at the Olympics before turning to acting. He really was a magnificent specimen.

Here he is in his glory days.

In Hollywood today, he’d get laughed out of the casting call. After the war, Audie Murphy turned his fame into a lucrative acting career, mostly starring in movies where he played a stalwart soldier, which the scrawny little guy could do because everyone knew Murphy was the real deal. He could also do it because the whole society had just been through the worst war in human history and everyone knew that “tough” and “strong” are not synonyms for “tall” and “muscular.”

If this were only a pop culture phenomenon, I probably wouldn’t write about it. Pop culture isn’t my remit. But this isn’t only about pop culture.

For a narcissistic sociopath, outward appearances and prejudices are all that exist, and the President of the United States is a narcissistic sociopath. That is why looking “straight from central casting” is — along with slavish loyalty and a willingness to abase oneself in the master’s service — Donald Trump’s top criterion for any job. And why that phrase is his highest praise for anyone.

In the mind of someone so afflicted, it is obvious that a good general should look and talk like Patton. But not the real George Patton. He should look and talk like George C. Scott in Patton, the movie, because that’s the image of Patton in collective imagination. No woman can do that, so clearly any woman who is a general or admiral must be a DEI hire who should be cleared out immediately.

Similarly, good soldiers should look and talk like Sylvester Stallone, maybe, or Jason Statham, or those badasses who accompanied Arnold Schwarzenegger into the jungles of Central America to fight the Predator. That’s what “straight form central casting” means for a modern “warrior.”

Naturally, this pathological thinking isn’t limited to Trump’s cranium. The Republican Party now worships the golden calf in the White House so all his bizarre beliefs and obsessions become theirs, too. All the more so for MAGA. When George W. Bush tried to nominate his personal lawyer to the Supreme Court, he was immediately laughed into a humiliating retreat by Republicans, but when Trump tapped a Fox News weekend host to become the head of the most powerful, complex, and sophisticated military in human history, Trump’s party and movement stood up and saluted. Look at that guy! Straight out of central casting!

All that said, I doubt this is entirely the product of Trump’s personal pathologies. There’s likely some primal wiring involved, too. That’s because it was quite reasonable to think height and muscle and a square jaw corresponded with fighting ability for most of human history — right from the moment the first man picked up a rock to crack another man’s head until the last time a sword was plunged into an enemy’s guts. The evolution of battlefield technology rapidly changed that reality only over the last several centuries. By the time of the Second World War, a certain level of strength and cardiovascular fitness were still essential, of course, but tenacity, steady aim, and a cool head under fire were far more important. A man built like Pete Hegseth would have been the heavy favourite over Audie Murphy in the Crusader era Hegseth pines for; but in the modern era, Audie Murphy would win every time.

The advance of battlefield technology, and its erosion of the importance of muscle, has only accelerated in the near-century since the end of the Second World War. Invisible qualities like grit, intelligence, and self-control count even more, and muscle even less, than they did in Audie Murphy’s day. Anyone who thinks square jaws and bulging biceps make a warrior should have a conversation with a Ukrainian woman wearing FPV goggles.

Donald Trump is quite likely incapable of grasping that. Pete Hegseth seems determined to see things his way, which is unsurprising given that Pete Hegseth was an alcoholic fuckup whose career had plateaued at the level of a strutting Fox weekend host until Donald Trump’s pathological need for people “straight from central casting” suddenly made him the commander of the world’s most powerful military. Hence the spectacle of the buff Secretary of Defense lecturing generals and admirals on the importance of grooming standards, pull-ups and pushups, and keeping fatties out of the ranks. Fitness still matters, of course, although its importance varies from role to role and the vast majority of those in uniform are not special operators running down the ramp of a Chinook. But I’m pretty sure generals and admirals already know that. What they need to learn more about — from someone like, say, the Secretary of Defense — is accelerating geo-political fracturing, the struggle for electromagnetic spectrum dominance, the threat of hypersonic missiles, the terrifying implications of AI-coordinated swarms of cheap drones, and a thousand other subjects more important than morning burpees.

But in Donald Trump’s America, what really matters is that the US military be “straight from central casting.¹ So crank up the PT, warriors.

But enough of Trump and his circus. Let me close with one last image. This one goes way back.

If you were casting the part of a brilliant field marshal who changed the course of history with his battlefield mastery, would you choose this sad, droopy old man? Of course not.

That sad, droopy old man is Helmuth von Moltke, the Prussian general who won a dazzling series of wars culminating in Prussia’s defeat of France in 1870 and the creation of modern Germany. He was the most successful battlefield commander since Napoleon. But unlike Napoleon, he never lost.

Moltke was a tall, skinny, almost gaunt man whose most pronounced trait was his silence. He didn’t give rousing speeches. He did not urge the troops on to victory. He didn’t deliver TED talks on strategy and war. He barely spoke at all. The man known as der grosse Schweiger, the great silent one, simply observed and thought and gave directions. Trump would call him a total stiff.

When von Moltke was given command of Prussia’s armies to lead the wars that created Germany, he was already 65 years old. If he’d been a general in today’s American military, he would surely have been pushed out years before those wars started.

I mean, just look at him. How many pull-ups do you think that loser can do?

1. There were too many other bizarre touches to Hegseth’s speech to mention. Ditto the pocket square Hegseth had in his suit jacket, as he usually does. That pocket square is a straightforward violation of the Flag Code, which says the flag “should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery.” So the Secretary of Defense actually stood on stage and chastised the assembled generals and admirals — “no more beards, long hair, superficial individual expression. We’re going to cut our hair, shave our beards, and adhere to standards” — while he was flagrantly violating the Flag Code.

As Bugs Bunny liked to say, what a maroon.

There were other incongruities worth noting. For one thing, while Hegseth was cracking down on “standards,” he didn’t mention tattoos. Hegseth’s own bulging muscles are famously covered in tattoos — tattoos which, not so long ago, would have fallen afoul of military regulations that only grudgingly accepted tattoos and which demanded they be kept hidden. Or be erased. But those regulations were relaxed around 2015, partly to widen the recruiting pool. Which kinda sounds “woke” or “DEI” or something. More seriously, there is a prima facie argument that Hegseth’s tattoos, which are full of Crusader imagery popular with Christian nationalists and white nationalists, violate the existing ban on extremist tattoos. In fact, when Hegseth was in the National Guard, he was reported on exactly those grounds. Of course, no one should be punished for the associations others have attached to symbols. But the tattoos are far from the only evidence. Hegseth has made many statements, notably in his published books, suggesting he really is an extremist. At a minimum, there is more than enough evidence on his skin and on paper to warrant an investigation — or there would be if he weren’t Secretary of Defense and the administration wasn’t controlled by a dangerous authoritarian with contempt for the rule of law.