On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the end of the flu vaccine mandate for military service members, citing a need to “restore freedom.” This, as many have noted, is in direct opposition to a 1777 decision by future President George Washington, in which he ordered that all American soldiers be vaccinated against smallpox to ensure the army of the emerging United States would be healthy enough to fight the British. Hegseth has thrown that out the window, and according to renowned economist Paul Krugman, it not only diminishes U.S. military readiness, but is an act of “hypocrisy” that aims to “destroy the integrity of the professional military” and “cultify” the armed forces.
Krugman suggests a number of issues with Hegseth’s decision.
First, the self-titled “Secretary of War” — who Krugman describes as a “bloodthirsty religious fanatic” who is “more comfortable with fascism than with America’s founding principles” — is displaying clear “hypocrisy.” On one hand, Hegseth claims the inalienable right to control “your body, your faith, and your convictions,” but on the other, he has banned beards and argued that troops and generals should lose weight because “it’s a bad look.”
“But requiring that serving troops receive a vaccine that helps maintain their military effectiveness and also helps protect their comrades from infection?” writes Krugman sarcastically. “Tyranny!”
And as Krugman notes, surrendering a certain amount of personal “freedom” has always been inherent to military service in the first place. “When Americans sign up to serve the nation under arms, they agree to temporarily forego many of the freedoms of civilian life,” he writes. “They must wear uniforms, not street fashion. They must eat Army or Navy food. They must salute officers and obey orders. They must, in other words, adhere to military discipline.”
But Krugman is most concerned with what he calls Hegseth’s attempts to “cultify” the military by “creating an environment in which professional integrity, military discipline, and historical precedent are destroyed in service to the personality cult of Donald Trump.”
As Krugman explains, “Think of these directives as loyalty tests. Hegseth can indulge his faux concerns about liberty while aligning himself with the science-hating right. If you are an officer concerned about the welfare of your troops and voice your concerns, you are out. Mention that the directive against beards is nonsensical and disproportionately harms black male soldiers with a common skin condition, then you are a woke weakling and are sent packing. If you are a general in possession of critical skills and hard-won experience, but served during the Biden administration, you will be unceremoniously fired.”
Krugman concludes that “the method in Hegseth’s apparent madness is to destroy the integrity of the professional military corps through destructive and despotic behavior that drives out those…who hold to their principles. And this should terrify every American.”
