FOR MILITARIZATION AGAINST TRUMP

What if we imagine a utopia of the complete militarization of society as the only realistic emancipatory vision?

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On Tuesday, September 30, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a long, weird speech in Quantico to the entire top brass of the US Army, flown there from all around the world, deploying his vision for how the US military will physically look and act, and offering a stark conclusion: If you don’t agree, resign. “The right policies, according to Hegseth, center on his broader campaign against past efforts that he has deemed ‘woke,’ aimed at promoting diversity or accommodating troops—the specifics of which were made official in ten directives sent out to military leadership as he spoke. There will be no ‘fat troops’ or ‘fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,’ Hegseth said. Troops will be clean-shaven, and the military will offer few, if any, exemptions, either for religious or medical needs. There will be only male physical standards for combat jobs, and if that means there are no women in those roles, ‘it is what it is.’”

As anonymously noted by many officers present, this image of a soldier is much more theatrical than a faithful rendering of army life as it actually is. Hegseth’s wish to get “real soldiers” resuscitates an old image of a soldier that has no place in today’s wars, fought by drones and rockets mostly controlled by geeks behind a screen, and in today’s world where we were just informed about the first AI-generated actress, “Tilly Norwood,” who already appeared as the star in the AI-generated comedy sketch “AI Commissioner” and in various promotional and social media content. Paradoxically, Hegseth’s figure of a soldier is a masculine version of Tilly Norwood—an imagined fake we could call “Till Norwood.” However, more important than this fantasy is Hegseth’s description of what these new soldiers should be doing:

“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement. This administration has done a great deal from Day 1 to remove the social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department—to rip out the politics, no more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris.”¹

It is a coincidence, but an important one, that this event took place a few days after Vladimir Putin signed the law on Russia’s withdrawal from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The formal decision is one more step in Russia’s complete disengagement from its international commitments and clearly demonstrates Russia’s disregard for the protection of human rights. It has not allowed any monitoring visits to places of deprivation of liberty. The primary victims of the decision are and will be Russian citizens. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation, “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment are used as state-sanctioned tools for systemic oppression in the Russian Federation,” and, of course, in Ukraine.² Torture legitimized—this is the Russian version of what happens when “we untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country”...

And who are these enemies? After Hegseth, Trump himself took the stage and, in an even longer ramble, proposed using American cities as training grounds for the armed forces. His central claim was that the US needs its military might to combat what he called the “invasion from within,” as Steve Bannon had already written in his justification for the use of US Marines against protesters in Los Angeles:

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”³