Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday ordered a department-wide review of existing standards for each military branch on physical fitness, body composition, and grooming — including on beards, Breitbart News has exclusively learned.
“We must remain vigilant in maintaining the standards that enable the men and women of our military to protect the American people and our homeland as the world’s most lethal and effective fighting force,” Hegseth said in a March 12, 2025, memorandum ordering the review.
“Our adversaries are not growing weaker, and our tasks are not growing less challenging. This review will illuminate how the Department has maintained the level of standards required over the recent past and the trajectory of any change in those standards,” he added.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot added in a statement to Breitbart News:
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. Secretary Hegseth is committed to restoring high standards, and this review is the first step in doing so.
Hegseth directed the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (USD(P&R)) to gather the existing aforementioned standards set by each military branch, review them and how they have changed over the last decade, since January 1, 2015.
The review will also look at why those standards changed and the impact of those changes.
Read the memo:
Rapid Force-Wide Review of Military Standards by Kristina Wong on Scribd
Hegseth has made returning the military to its core mission of warfighting his top priority, which includes having forces ready and fit to fight.
Hegseth spoke about the importance of standards at his confirmation hearing in January, telling Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) that “ensuring that standards are equal and high is of importance to [the president] and great importance to me.”
“Because in those ground combat roles, what is true is that the weight of the ruck on your back does not change. The weight of the 155 round that you have to carry does not change. The weight of the 240-Bravo machine gun you might have to carry does not change,” he said.
“And so whether it is a man or a woman, they have to meet the same high standards. And Senator, in any place where those things have been eroded or in courses criteria have been changed in order to meet quotas — racial quotas or gender quotas — that is putting a focus on something other than readiness, standards, meritocracy, and lethality.”
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