Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a sweeping, military-wide review of physical fitness and grooming standards with the apparent aim of making the military a stricter and less accommodating environment for troops.

In a memo released late Wednesday, Hegseth ordered Darin Selnick, the man who is performing the duties of under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, to review “existing standards set by the Military Departments pertaining to physical fitness, body composition, and grooming, which includes but is not limited to beards.”

While the memo itself doesn’t offer insight into what Hegseth and the Pentagon would do following this review, the rhetoric from Hegseth, as well as the results of similar reviews within the military branches, suggests that many of the recent policies put in place to make serving easier for women and minorities may soon go away.

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Within the memo itself, Hegseth argued that the military is “made stronger and more disciplined with high, uncompromising, and clear standards” and largely stuck to more elevated rhetoric about the need to maintain “the world’s most lethal and effective fighting force.”

Online, however, he was more direct.

“Our troops will be fit — not fat,” Hegseth wrote in a post on social media late Wednesday.

“Our troops will look sharp — not sloppy,” he continued, adding that the Defense Department “will make standards high and great again — across the entire force.”

Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot, in a rare statement, went after weight standards while also personally attacking the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley.

“Unfortunately, the U.S. military’s high standards on body composition and other metrics eroded in recent years, particularly during the tenure of former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, who set a bad example from the top through his own personal corpulence,” Ullyot said in a statement provided to Military.com on Thursday.

A Personal Fight for Hegseth

However, neither Hegseth nor Ullyot offered any evidence to back their claim that standards — especially weight standards — have been decreased or eased in recent years.

In fact, in some cases, the services have been tightening the rules around how body composition — whether someone is overweight or not — is measured.

In June 2023, the Army moved to assessing body fat using a tape measurement around the waist only. It was part of an effort to move away from more outdated and inaccurate methods of measuring body fat and was seen as being less forgiving than the previous method of measuring both waist and neck.

In other cases, the services have tried to make those measurements more accurate.

In 2023, after completing a medical study, the Marine Corps started using far more precise methods of measuring body fat — dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, known as DEXA, or bioelectrical impedance analysis, known as BIA — before officially declaring a Marine overweight and assigning them to the remedial body composition program.

The Navy has had the same body composition standards since 2015.

The exemptions to those tests are also aimed at troops who are high performers on fitness exams and struggle to meet the body standards because of their muscle mass.

The services have loosened the body composition rules for recruits as a way to get more people to enlist and as an acknowledgment of the fact that America as a whole is struggling with obesity. However, those recruits are still expected to conform to the same standard as everyone else in their service in order to graduate and serve.

Meanwhile, in his last book, Hegseth also took aim at the Pentagon’s efforts to allow troops to sport different hair styles and offer exemptions for some troops to grow beards.

Citing a report that Defense Secretary Mark Esper commissioned during the first Trump term, Hegseth argued that these changes were a loosening of standards.

“When I was in the Army, we kicked out good soldiers for having naked women tattooed on their arms, and today we are relaxing the standards on shaving, dreadlocks, man buns, and straight-up obesity,” Hegseth wrote.

“Piece by piece, the standards had to go … because of equity,” he added.

While the services have all allowed their troops to sport a growing variety of hairstyles over the years, many of those changes have been not only popular but hard fought and driven by female service members advocating to their respective services.

They have also been in response to women suffering from conditions like alopecia, a type of hair loss that comes from constantly wearing their hair in a tight bun.

Some of the changes were specifically aimed at Black service members, but those exemptions or changes were focused on easing their life within the military or addressing medical concerns.

When the services began to allow styles like twists and cornrows, it was because female service members pushed them to do it, arguing that the styles were easier to manage in adverse circumstances and cheaper to maintain.

Similarly, the conversation around loosening beard restrictions and issuing permanent exemptions is one that is rooted in medical issues that disproportionately affect Black men.

The frequent ingrown hairs and skin irritations caused by regular shaving known as pseudofolliculitis barbae, or PFB, occur in about 45% of Black service members, according to a 2021 study.

In 2022, Black sailors told Navy Times they found the service’s efforts to push them to shave was causing medical problems — and its haphazard approach to dealing with the issue discriminatory.

While waivers were available, since they were just that — exemptions and not policy, Black sailors have repeatedly said in various venues that they felt their only choice was to pass up job opportunities or face scarring and discomfort.

“It certainly felt discriminatory to the folks I talked to,” John Cordle, a former Navy captain, said in a 2021 article. Cordle added that, while he was in the Navy, he was “woefully misinformed” on the issue and its effect on his Black sailors while in command.

And the issue isn’t confined to the Navy.

A 2021 study in the Military Medicine journal found that some airmen with shaving waivers progressed slower in their Air Force careers and weren’t promoted as fast as their peers. The findings showed a bias “against the presence of facial hair which will likely always affect the promotions of Blacks/African Americans disproportionately.”

Hegseth’s argument to turn back the clock on the limited exemptions to the military’s insistence on shaving can have ramifications on who ends up choosing to serve.

Cordle’s article notes that one former Black naval officer told him that his “father’s face was a scarred mess” from shaving over the course of his Navy career and “lots of talent is lost to this policy in my view.”

What a Renewed Push on Standards Could Look Like

The Air Force began a renewed focus on standards just prior to Hegseth’s arrival, and it could offer an example of what all the services might be seeing soon.

In early January, ahead of Trump beginning his second term, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin released a video and memo to the entire service in which he called on commanders to review and enforce existing standards, ranging from following safety regulations and calling formations during which troops’ uniforms and appearance would be inspected.

At the beginning of this month, the Air Force surgeon general tasked every airman with resetting their shaving profile — a move that means they would need to re-justify the medical need for a shaving exception to a doctor.

In 2020, the Air Force surgeon general made it so that any shaving waivers for PFB would last for five years, but the new changes forces all airmen to undergo more scrutiny to separate shaving irritation from a PFB diagnosis.

While previously 60 nail colors were allowed, the service recently ordered that nail polish must be only “clear or French or American manicure.”

Additionally, the service reaffirmed that hair must “not touch the ears,” and it made a renewed push for a “gig line” when in dress uniform — or purposely lining up the front button edge of the shirt, belt buckle and fly of the pants.

Notably, the Air Force’s recent reinforcement of standards comes across as being at odds with the swath of more progressive dress, grooming and tattoo policies.

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