Hegseth Can't Fix America's Fitness Crisis
The Secretary of War is right to restore standards. But the real battle begins on the playground.
The “Pete and Bobby Challenge” started in good fun.
Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. challenged Americans to complete 100 pushups and 50 pull-ups as fast as possible, and they did it themselves—posting impressive times.
But soon after, the mood darkened.
Hegseth recalled the generals to Washington for what MSNBC described as a “dressing down.”
This was part of the Department of Defense’s rebrand—or rather, reversion—to the Department of War.
Now, that sounds somewhat ominous—bellicose, even.
But the substance of the speech was hard to disagree with. Among the directives: no more DEI offices, no more “identity months,” and as Hegseth put it bluntly, “no more dudes in dresses.” He announced the end of what he called the “woke garbage” that had infected the department.
“As I’ve said before and will say again,” Hegseth declared, “we are done with that $#@*.”
The particular headline that caught my attention, however, was about the return to earlier standards for physical fitness: gender-neutral physical standards for combat roles, daily physical training for all service members, plus mandatory PT tests twice a year for everyone including generals.
“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth said.
“Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.”
You could call this rhetoric unstatesmanlike.
But I hear echoes of JFK, who once said there was “nothing… more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week’s exercise.”
What the Greeks Knew
In December 1960, just weeks before his inauguration, Kennedy published “The Soft American” in Sports Illustrated—a sweeping essay that opened with the ancient Greeks (reproduced below, in full text, as well as my proprietary deepfake audio).
“Beginning more than 2,500 years ago,” Kennedy wrote, “men thronged every four years to the sacred grove of Olympia, under the shadow of Mount Cronus, to compete in the most famous athletic contests of history—the Olympian games.”
The Greeks, he continued, “prized physical excellence and athletic skills among man’s great goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state.” Kennedy then traced this knowledge through Western civilization: “from the mens sana in corpore sano of the Romans to the British belief that the playing fields of Eton brought victory on the battlefields of Europe.”
His point was profound: “The knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation is as old as Western civilization itself.”
This was the original culture war. The war over civilization itself. (Dudes in dresses are downstream of this.)
The recognition that a society’s physical vitality and its capacity for self-governance are inseparable. The Greeks didn’t produce philosophy, drama, and democratic institutions despite their emphasis on physical excellence. They produced them because of it. A people capable of great physical feats are capable of great intellectual and moral feats.
Kennedy then presented the evidence of American decline: The Kraus-Weber studies showed 57.9% of American children failing basic fitness tests, compared to just 8.7% of European children. In strength tests specifically, 35.7% of American children failed, while only 1.1% of Europeans did—and among Austrian and Swiss youth, the failure rate was as low as 0.5%.
I don’t know how the kids today stack up to their European counterparts, but I know they haven’t gotten any fitter.
JFK framed this as a national security crisis: “Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.”
But Kennedy went further, connecting physical fitness to America’s ideological struggle: “We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want.”
The Cold War would be won by demonstrating that free people could be more capable, vigorous, and energetic than those living under totalitarian control.
(Side note: while elite Soviet sports science continued to outpace the United States, their average citizen suffered a host of physical maladies resulting from the general poverty, scarcity and desolation that came from living under communism.)
Kennedy concluded: “For physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies.”
Read today, Kennedy’s essay feels prophetic. You cannot have a vigorous democracy run by people too soft to climb a flight of stairs. You cannot have a dynamic population that lacks the physical energy to sustain focused work. You cannot project strength abroad when your own citizens embody weakness.
This is the framework Hegseth should be using. The ultimate culture war, if we must call it that, is between those who recognize the objective standards of health, beauty, and capability honored by every successful civilization in history, and those who pretend such standards are oppressive social constructs.
Reality, after all, is the only objective test of truth. Did you win the battle? Did you build the stadium? Could you keep pace with your fellow soldiers on a long march into combat? The weight of the rucksack doesn’t care about your politics or your feelings.
I think this is what Hegseth is trying—however crudely—to restore.
Commands Without Methods
Lest Kennedy be accused of punching down at chubby youth, it’s worth remembering that his 50-mile march directive was, like Hegseth’s speech, aimed at top brass. Likewise, Teddy Roosevelt’s original marching order had targeted officers who were commanding their troops into battle, which included lengthy marches by necessity.
For both presidents, the 50-mile march was about putting skin in the game—aligning the incentives of those who would give the orders with those who would bear their burden.
This principle becomes more timely when our elected officials are weighing whether to escalate a new round of conflicts abroad—Iran, Venezuela, and whoever else those countries might pull in with them.
These are dangerous times.
Hegseth’s speech might be interpreted as war drums beating. But a more hopeful interpretation is that he wants to avoid war by making it more costly—again, skin in the game. In his speech, Hegseth quoted Eugene Sledge’s World War II memoir:
“War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it. The only redeeming factors are my comrades’ incredible bravery and their devotion to each other.”
Hegseth goes on to castigate the cowardly politicians who, having never seen war themselves, are all too eager to commit troops to far-flung regions where America has questionable interests. These are the same people who talk about “kinetic operations” and “overseas contingency operations” instead of calling it what war really is: sending young men to kill and die.
“Peace through strength” is not a new mantra, nor is it the Orwellian oxymoron it might sound like on first hearing. Kennedy, Roosevelt, and many other presidents have espoused the virtues of hegemonic American power—the Pax Americana—a katechonic force that restrains chaotic violence with its orderly imposition of a clear world order through the threat of (or actual) violence.
It’s hard to take Hegseth’s critics at MSNBC seriously when they scold him for lack of decorum or call him crazed. He’s espousing views that the average Democrat in the 1960s—even a liberal democrat, like Kennedy—would have taken for granted. When mainstream norms have drifted so far that basic physical fitness standards sound partisan, perhaps we need a Hegseth-type who is willing to say them out loud.
But there is a risk in this approach—one that Kennedy understood and Hegseth seems to have missed.
It’s one thing to dress down fat generals. It’s another to provide them the method to get fit. Kennedy went beyond rhetoric. He created the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, funded research into physical education programs, and provided schools with specific guidance on how to improve. He made it a federal priority with resources and roadmaps.
Hegseth has restored standards and delivered the rebuke. But for the rank and file who lack his warrior-discipline or Kennedy’s agency, “stop being fat” isn’t a strategy. Commands without methods breed resentment, not results. You can shame people into attempting change, but without a clear path forward, entropy always wins. The military is no exception to the laws of thermodynamics.
This moment is an opportunity to invoke American tradition and provide what that tradition actually offered: practical guidance. Roosevelt modeled “the strenuous life” and explained how to live it. Kennedy diagnosed American softness and prescribed specific fitness programs.
Better yet would be to couch these reforms in Kennedy’s civilizational framework: we restore physical standards because every successful society in history has recognized that physical vitality and national vitality are inseparable. This isn’t about left or right. It’s about up or down, strong or weak, capable or incapable.
I’ve written about the 50-mile march for years now, and I always wrestle with a sense of false bravado. Maybe Hegseth, for all his toughness and discipline, wrestles with it too. We are not the men of the Greatest Generation. We’ve fallen a long way. And maybe this honest recognition ought to be the starting point, instead of triumphalism.
Kennedy and Roosevelt both wrestled with their own infirmities. Kennedy’s chronic back pain kept him on crutches in private. Roosevelt’s childhood asthma nearly killed him. Yet both became icons of physical vigor. As St. Paul writes, our power is perfected in weakness.
Kennedy’s fitness initiatives never produced results. Our national fitness has declined steadily despite them. But Kennedy understood something Hegseth seems to have missed: the cultural change doesn’t start with fat generals in the Pentagon or recruits in boot camp. It starts much earlier.
Kennedy’s essay called for a return to vigorous childhood play—kids actually running, climbing, testing their bodies on playgrounds and playing fields rather than sitting as spectators. “We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators,” he wrote. “Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.”
He was right. By the time someone shows up overweight to basic training, you’re fighting decades of sedentary habits, metabolic damage, and learned helplessness around physical challenge. You can set all the standards you want, but if children spend their formative years indoors, staring at screens, never learning what their bodies can do, you’ll always be fighting uphill.
Standards matter—they give us something to test reality against. But the most important work happens long before anyone takes a fitness test. It happens when kids discover through play that their bodies are capable of hard things.
For adults who missed that foundation—and that’s most of us now—we need an equivalent discovery process. Not boot camp intensity that breaks people down, but a progressive method that builds them up. This is where the 50-mile march becomes essential, not as a test to pass, but as a training protocol that proves to yourself over months what childhood play should have taught: that you’re capable of far more than you think.
55 years elapsed between Roosevelt’s call in 1908 and Kennedy’s revival in 1963. We’re now 62 years past Kennedy. The tradition is overdue for a revival—but this time with the missing piece: a method of meeting the standard.
The Soft American
By President-Elect John F. Kennedy
December 26, 1960
Sports Illustrated
Beginning more than 2,500 years ago, from all quarters of the Greek world men thronged every four years to the sacred grove of Olympia, under the shadow of Mount Cronus, to compete in the most famous athletic contests of history—the Olympian games.
During the contest a sacred truce was observed among all the states of Greece as the best athletes of the Western world competed in boxing and foot races, wrestling and chariot races for the wreath of wild olive which was the prize of victory. When the winners returned to their home cities to lay the Olympian crowns in the chief temples they were greeted as heroes and received rich rewards. For the Greeks prized physical excellence and athletic skills among man’s great goals and among the prime foundations of a vigorous state.
Thus the same civilizations which produced some of our highest achievements of philosophy and drama, government and art, also gave us a belief in the importance of physical soundness which has become a part of Western tradition; from the mens sana in corpore sano of the Romans to the British belief that the playing fields of Eton brought victory on the battlefields of Europe. This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.
The first indication of a decline in the physical strength and ability of young Americans became apparent among United States soldiers in the early stages of the Korean War. The second came when figures were released showing that almost one out of every two young Americans was being rejected by Selective Service as mentally, morally or physically unfit. But the most startling demonstration of the general physical decline of American youth came when Dr. Hans Kraus and Dr. Sonja Weber revealed the results of 15 years of research centering in the Posture Clinic of New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital—results of physical fitness tests given to 4,264 children in this country and 2,870 children in Austria, Italy and Switzerland.
The findings showed that despite our unparalleled standard of living, despite our good food and our many playgrounds, despite our emphasis on school athletics, American youth lagged far behind Europeans in physical fitness. Six tests for muscular strength and flexibility were given; 57.9% of the American children failed one or more of these tests, while only 8.7% of the European youngsters failed.
A Consistent Decline
Especially disheartening were the results of the five strength tests: 35.7% of American children failed one or more of these, while only 1.1% of the Europeans failed, and among Austrian and Swiss youth the rate of failure was as low as .5%.
As a result of the alarming Kraus-Weber findings President Eisenhower created a Council on Youth Fitness at the Cabinet level and appointed a Citizens Advisory Committee on the Fitness of American Youth, composed of prominent citizens interested in fitness. Over the past five years the physical fitness of American youth has been discussed in forums, by committees and in leading publications. A 10-point program for physical fitness has been publicized and promoted. Our schools have been urged to give increased attention to the physical well-being of their students. Yet there has been no noticeable improvement. Physical fitness tests conducted last year in Britain and Japan showed that the youth of those countries were considerably more fit than our own children. And the annual physical fitness tests for freshmen at Yale University show a consistent decline in the prowess of young Americans; 51% of the class of 1951 passed these tests, 43% of the class of 1956 passed, and only 38%, a little more than a third, of the class of 1960 succeeded in passing the not overly rigorous examination.
Of course, physical tests are not infallible. They can distort the true health picture. There are undoubtedly many American youths and adults whose physical fitness matches and exceeds the best of other lands.
But the harsh fact of the matter is that there is also an increasingly large number of young Americans who are neglecting their bodies—whose physical fitness is not what it should be—who are getting soft. And such softness on the part of individual citizens can help to strip and destroy the vitality of a nation.
For the physical vigor of our citizens is one of America’s most precious resources. If we waste and neglect this resource, if we allow it to dwindle and grow soft then we will destroy much of our ability to meet the great and vital challenges which confront our people. We will be unable to realize our full potential as a nation.
Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom. The young men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks’ basic training or a month’s conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.
Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.
However, we do not, like the ancient Spartans, wish to train the bodies of our youths merely to make them more effective warriors. It is our profound hope and expectation that Americans will never again have to expend their strength in armed conflict.
But physical fitness is as vital to the activities of peace as to those of war, especially when our success in those activities may well determine the future of freedom in the years to come. We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress and the elimination of poverty and want. To meet the challenge of this enemy will require determination and will and effort on the part of all Americans. Only if our citizens are physically fit will they be fully capable of such an effort.
For physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies.
In this sense, physical fitness is the basis of all the activities of our society. And if our bodies grow soft and inactive, if we fail to encourage physical development and prowess, we will undermine our capacity for thought, for work and for the use of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America.
Thus the physical fitness of our citizens is a vital prerequisite to America’s realization of its full potential as a nation, and to the opportunity of each individual citizen to make full and fruitful use of his capacities.
It is ironic that at a time when the magnitude of our dangers makes the physical fitness of our citizens a matter of increasing importance, it takes greater effort and determination than ever before to build the strength of our bodies. The age of leisure and abundance can destroy vigor and muscle tone as effortlessly as it can gain time. Today human activity, the labor of the human body, is rapidly being engineered out of working life. By the 1970s, according to many economists, the man who works with his hands will be almost extinct.
Many of the routine physical activities which earlier Americans took for granted are no longer part of our daily life. A single look at the packed parking lot of the average high school will tell us what has happened to the traditional hike to school that helped to build young bodies. The television set, the movies and the myriad conveniences and distractions of modern life all lure our young people away from the strenuous physical activity that is the basis of fitness in youth and in later life.
Now It Is Time
Of course, modern advances and increasing leisure can add greatly to the comfort and enjoyment of life. But they must not be confused with indolence, with, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “slothful ease,” with an increasing deterioration of our physical strength. For the strength of our youth and the fitness of our adults are among our most important assets, and this growing decline is a matter of urgent concern to thoughtful Americans.
This is a national problem, and requires national action. President Eisenhower helped show the way through his own interest and by calling national attention to our deteriorating standards of physical fitness. Now it is time for the United States to move forward with a national program to improve the fitness of all Americans.
FIRST: We must establish a White House Committee on Health and Fitness to formulate and carry out a program to improve the physical condition of the nation. This committee will include the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and the Secretary of the Interior. The executive order creating the committee will clearly state its purpose, and coordinate its activities with the many federal programs which bear a direct relation to the problem of physical fitness.
SECOND: The physical fitness of our youth should be made the direct responsibility of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This department should conduct—through its Office of Education and the National Institutes of Health—research into the development of a physical fitness program for the nation’s public schools. The results of this research shall be made freely available to all who are interested. In addition, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare should use all its existing facilities to attack the lack of youth fitness as a major health problem.
THIRD: The governor of each state will be invited to attend an annual National Youth Fitness Congress. This congress will examine the progress which has been made in physical fitness during the preceding year, exchange suggestions for improving existing programs and provide an opportunity to encourage the states to implement the physical fitness program drawn up by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Our states are anxious to participate in such programs, to make sure that their youth have the opportunity for full development of their bodies as well as their minds.
FOURTH: The President and all departments of government must make it clearly understood that the promotion of sports participation and physical fitness is a basic and continuing policy of the United States. By providing such leadership, by keeping physical fitness in the forefront of the nation’s concerns, the federal government can make a substantial contribution toward improving the health and vigor of our citizens.
But no matter how vigorous the leadership of government, we can fully restore the physical soundness of our nation only if every American is willing to assume responsibility for his own fitness and the fitness of his children. We do not live in a regimented society where men are forced to live their lives in the interest of the state. We are, all of us, as free to direct the activities of our bodies as we are to pursue the objects of our thought. But if we are to retain this freedom, for ourselves and for generations yet to come, then we must also be willing to work for the physical toughness on which the courage and intelligence and skill of man so largely depend.
All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community. We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.