The military's new mandatory test could backfire — big time

Members of the U.S. navy gather to listen to U.S. President Donald Trump's remarks during a Navy 250 Celebration in Norfolk, Virginia, U.S. October 5, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee, hats in hand. The Pentagon is burning through appropriations, with both Navy and Air Force 2026 operations budgets set to run out by the end of July. The war in Iran has depleted key weapons stockpiles, reducing U.S. inventories of interceptor missiles and stealth cruise missiles to less than half and costing over $37 billion to date. To the naked eye, these costs reflect disastrous mismanagement of an unauthorized and escalating war.

On Wednesday, the GOP-led House approved a whopping defense funding bill anyway, authorizing an unprecedented $1 trillion for military spending. Not only did the MAGA wing reward Trump’s incompetent war in Iran with a massive spending boost, it codified Hegseth’s rebrand of the “Department of War,” snuck in Trump’s voter suppression bill, and blocked hormone therapy coverage for gender care just as Hegseth is braying about testosterone levels.

Hegseth expected lawmakers to correct his urgent shortfall, but wouldn’t correct, clarify or explain his own false claims about Iran. Hegseth’s early-in-the-war announcement that Iran’s military had been “destroyed and made combat ineffective” was obviously untrue, but republicans still put an unprecedented $1trillion budget in his hands. Arming a blowhard who delivers braggadocio instead of sober analysis is not confidence inspiring, it’s irresponsible. It’s also scary as hell.

Hegseth’s bloodlust

As a Fox News commentator, Hegseth lobbied hard for presidential pardons for war criminals, leading Trump to fully pardon a Lieutenant convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and a Major who admitted to the CIA that he killed someone off base in 2010 and buried his remains. For his own activities in Iraq, Hegseth kept a ‘kill board’ totaling up his kills, including dead civilians, providing context for his bloodlust today (“maximum lethality not tepid legality”) and his disdain for restraint (“stupid rules of engagement.”)

Hegseth seems to be grooming U.S. servicemembers for war crimes, taking them to a place where rules and laws do not apply. Added to over 200 extrajudicial killings in South America, they bombed a school in Iran, killing 175 grade-schoolers, and are now bombing Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure and water desalination facilities, more war crimes. Millions of Iranians are living under fire in nightmarish hellscapes, compounding anti-American hatred sure to outlast Trump for generations.

This is the same idiocy that blames other countries for climate-change induced wildfires, while pouring gas on the flames. But of all the mistakes, bloodlust, and incompetence displayed to date, none is more dangerous than Hegseth’s new obsession with testosterone.

Hegsethis mandating testosterone testing

On July 16, Hegseth announced mandatory annual testosterone screening for troops 30 years and older, a new initiative that Hegseth claims will ensure enlistees “have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute ⁠best.” What he didn’t announce is that testosterone supplements can cause infertility, shrink testicles, and drive up red blood cell counts, which thickens blood and raises the risk of blood clots and pulmonary embolism.

Even worse is what T supplements can do to overall IQ and cognitive functioning. Medical studies have tracked how increased testosterone levels can induce aggressive behavior because they also change brain wave patterns.

Although Hegseth and other chest beaters think increased testosterone will make men quicker and sharper, medical research suggests the opposite. The relationship between T and IQ is shaped like an inverted U: cognitive performance is strongest when testosterone sits in a moderate range, and dramatically declines at both low and high ends of the spectrum.

In short, when T levels are too high, men get stupid. While that may explain some of Hegseth’s frequent blunders, excessive testosterone among the troops would present obvious risks.

Too much T rots your brain: How excess testosterone impairs cognitive performance

In controlled studies that raised serum testosterone in healthy men to ‘supraphysiological’ levels — beyond what the body normally produces — researchers measured how verbal and spatial memory changed, confirming a downturn in cognition levels at high doses. Rather than testosterone being simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the brain, research shows that it can help or hurt cognition depending on where a person's levels fall relative to their own physiological baseline.

This pattern shows up in the medical research repeatedly, across different populations and cognitive domains. But Hegseth’s directive aims to establish hormonal baselines across the force, which cannot measure or indicate how a person's levels compare to their own past historical baseline.

None of this makes testosterone a villain. Men with low testosterone face meaningfully higher risk of dementia, and testosterone loss with age also contributes to cognitive decline. The nuance assuredly lost on Hegseth is that pushing testosterone artificially high — whether through unsupervised supplementation, misuse of steroids, or aggressive hormone therapy — can backfire, and erode memory and executive function. Hegseth seems to think that hormones are simple dials where more is better, but they are biometric signals the brain has evolved to interpret within complex ranges, and stepping too far outside that range — in either direction — comes at a cost.

Will Hegseth have the cognitive bandwidth, or even the professional discipline, to consult medical research before pushing T supplements to millions of servicemembers? Color me skeptical. He’s chief mouth-breather to the most incompetent, anti-science, anti-intellectual administration the world has ever seen. But he knows that when Trump starts deploying the military against U.S. citizens, aggressive soldiers with low brain function will make the perfect Praetorian Guard.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

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