The Pentagon's Hormone Politics
A testosterone screening mandate and a shadowed combat study reveal how biology is becoming the Pentagon's new battlefield.
By The Defense Desk
The Pentagon is simultaneously mandating testosterone screening for hundreds of thousands of male troops and quietly commissioning a study of whether women belong in combat at all — two policy moves that, taken together, signal something more than routine force-readiness reviews. [1][2]
Start with the testosterone program. [2]
A study published in JAMA, based on data from five Army bases surveyed between August 2024 and January 2026, offers the first hard look at what that mandate will actually produce. Of male soldiers younger than 30, 20% had testosterone levels below the 300 nanograms per deciliter threshold set by the American Urological Association. Among those aged 30 and older, the figure climbed to 32.8%. In raw numbers, one-time screening of active-duty soldiers identified 100,691 with morning testosterone levels below that threshold. [2]
Critically, the researchers from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge and the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick cautioned that those numbers do not mean all flagged soldiers have hypogonadism — a clinical condition diagnosed in just 0.43%, or 12,112, of more than 2.8 million service members in a separate study conducted last year. [2]
The JAMA authors warned that a "Positive screening result requires clinical interpretation and typically prompts repeat testing, further evaluation, counseling regarding modifiable factors, and consideration of treatment if indicated." Treatment itself carries real risks: mood swings, irritability and aggression, blood clots, and low sperm count that can cause infertility. [2]
Hegseth has framed the initiative differently. In a video posted to social media, he said the program was about ensuring troops stay on the "leading edge of lethality" — language that resonates with a $4.5 billion commercial testosterone industry that markets the hormone as a driver of physical performance, sex drive, concentration, and youthful energy. [2]
That rhetorical frame — lethality as biology, biology as character — threads directly into the second controversy unfolding across the Potomac.
In January, the Pentagon commissioned the Institute for Defense Analyses to study women's "effectiveness" in combat roles, a decade after those positions were formally opened to women. [1]
[1]
ACLU senior counsel Gillian Thomas argued that Hegseth — who wrote in his book The War on Warriors that "we need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units" — aims to use the study to validate conclusions he has already reached. In a November 2024 interview on the Sean Ryan Podcast, Hegseth stated plainly: "I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles." [1]
Together, these two episodes trace the same arc: science as political instrument, dressed in the language of readiness and standards, deployed to answer questions that were largely settled — and now, apparently, are not.
Environmental exposures, combat, sleep deprivation, and mental health conditions all contribute to low testosterone in service members, according to the JAMA researchers — factors that have little to do with masculine character and everything to do with the conditions of military service itself. [2]
What the Pentagon measures, and who it chooses to study, is never a neutral act. Both of these programs carry the weight of conclusions written before the data was collected.