Brandeis Magazine

Is the U.S. military's use of demeaning language a necessary evil or a red flag?

By Janet McIntosh

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth at Michigan’s Selfridge Air National Guard Base in April. Photo Credit: Scott Olson / Getty Images

A couple of weeks before the January confirmation hearings for presidential appointee Pete Hegseth, now the U.S. secretary of defense, I read the book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” written by Hegseth and published last year.

During the confirmation hearings, Democratic senators pressed Hegseth on his lack of experience, reports of misconduct in his personal life, and his lack of support for a diverse military that includes women in combat roles — all of them crucial concerns.

I was surprised, though, by how little attention the senators paid to his views on warfare itself.

The final chapters of “The War on Warriors” had given me real pause. In them, Hegseth argues that military lawyers and international law unduly constrain violence in warfare. He poses a provocative hypothetical: “What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.”

Hegseth belongs to a long-standing faction within and outside the U.S. military that believes the Department of Defense has gone soft — not just by cracking down on war crimes, but by calling out patterns of discrimination and insensitivity inside the branches of the armed services.

For Hegseth, all this caring about the troops invites fragility, thereby posing a threat to national security. Certain military “elites” (whom he derisively calls “candy-asses”) have, in his view, made the U.S. armed services “woke and weak.” In Hegseth’s worldview, military personnel should channel their brutality toward America’s enemies while internally fostering an aggressive, ruthless masculinity — a self-styled “warrior culture.”

My book “Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics” (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores how the military’s use of language reflects this tension.

The Marine Corps, for example, imposes official limits on how recruits are trained. Senior drill instructors are required to deliver a speech to every new platoon: “We will treat you with firmness, fairness, dignity and compassion. Physical or verbal abuse by any Marine or recruit will not be tolerated.” The Recruit Training Order likewise prohibits drill instructors from using “cruel,” “abusive” or “demeaning” language, and directs them instead to “lead by example” and “forego fear and intimidation.”

To be sure, some Marine Corps drill instructors — perhaps especially the younger ones — take these directives seriously. Several told me about their compassionate training strategies, such as pulling a recruit aside to check on their well-being or focusing on positive reinforcement (“Everyone look at how Recruit Johnson is doing it — that’s the way to go”).

But other drill instructors follow the storied tradition of brutalizing recruits. Yelling is still considered a core part of basic training’s rite of passage. And, despite official prohibitions, so is debasing recruits with insults. These range from the mild (“whiners”) to the profane, hostile and sexist. Some — even in the post-“don’t ask, don’t tell” era — are homophobic.

How do drill instructors defend these practices? My fieldwork with veterans suggests many believe inflicting a certain level of psychological pain is necessary to shape an infantry force edgy enough to carry out violence on behalf of the state.

Harsh language, they say, is meant to inure recruits to all kinds of onslaughts, verbal or otherwise. By this logic, a person’s ability to withstand verbal abuse becomes a diagnostic tool for assessing broader resilience. I lost count of how many times I heard some version of “If you can’t handle a couple of insults, then you damn sure can’t handle combat.” Some veteran drill instructors use insults as a means of “breaking down” new recruits in order to rebuild them into strong soldiers.

But there may be another, more troubling intention at play. If drill instructors are meant to lead by example, then their debasement of recruits shows the recruits how to dehumanize others — specifically, the enemy.

Indeed, the use of slurs and sadistic language toward adversaries has been widely documented among U.S. combatants. Such language erodes the enemy’s perceived humanity, which appears to make it easier for infantry to carry out the act of killing. Equally troubling, some of these slurs are racially, ethnically or religiously grounded, casting a dehumanizing net wide enough to encompass civilians.

Where would Hegseth stand in the decades-long debate over how ruthless and aggressive military training should be? He almost certainly would align with Fred, a retired drill instructor I talked to in 2019, who vented about what he saw as the emasculation of recruit training. “What are they going to give these Marines at graduation, a dress?” he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“But, then,” Fred added, “it’s a whole generation of entitled liberal snowflakes.”

With Hegseth at the helm of the Defense Department, a mindset that has simmered in training environments is being codified as policy. He has wasted no time in advancing what he calls a restoration of the “warrior ethos.” In a recent speech at a U.S. military base in Qatar, he made it clear that lethality — not quality of life — is his top priority. He has rolled back a wide array of initiatives aimed at supporting service members, including the elimination of most DEI programs. Reading materials that include themes related to sensitivity or cultural awareness are being purged. 

It feels like open season for unchecked aggression, both toward America’s adversaries and within the military’s own ranks.

What will this mean for basic training? It’s easy to imagine some drill instructors interpreting Hegseth’s messages as a green light to become more aggressive with recruits, and show less regard for their mental and emotional limits. Recruits from marginalized groups may feel increasingly unwelcome in an environment that valorizes domination over cohesion.

And if dehumanization within the ranks deepens, it may well extend outward. As Hegseth casts doubt on international law and undermines legal constraints on warfare, the risk of U.S. forces committing war crimes grows more real.

The danger isn’t just what such a military might do abroad, but what kind of nation we might become at home.

Janet McIntosh is a professor of anthropology.