Writing a book like God Forgives, Brothers Don’t during the long twilight of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, journalist Jasper Craven discovered that the pipeline feeding young men into America’s fighting forces wasn’t just a response to war—it was a carefully engineered system. What he found was a sprawling network of military schools, ROTC programs, and a cultural pedagogy that had spent centuries convincing American boys that the path to manhood ran straight through the barracks. The result is a searing investigation into how the US military has become the nation’s primary engine of masculinity, and how that engine is now spinning out of control.

The Breakdown of the All-Volunteer Force

The starting point for understanding this crisis is the all-volunteer force (AVF), established in 1973 in the wake of Vietnam. For decades, the AVF managed to fill its ranks, but the post-9/11 era has exposed its fundamental fragility. Between 2022 and 2023, the Army fell short of its recruiting goals by 25% and 23% respectively—the worst slump since the draft ended. In response, the Pentagon has been forced into a desperate expansion of eligibility: raising the enlistment age from 35 to 42, easing restrictions on marijuana possession, and lowering physical and academic standards. Critics warn that the educational levels of new recruits continue to drop, and more than one in three service members fail to complete their initial enlistment. As one analysis puts it, the military is not representative of the American people “on almost any dimension,” drawing disproportionately from working-class towns and rural counties rather than affluent suburbs or elite university communities. In an economy where traditional markers of middle-class security—a home, a college degree, stable employment—have become increasingly difficult to attain, the armed forces stand out as one of the few institutions offering a guaranteed income and substantial education benefits. For young people in economically strained communities, enlistment is less a calling than a calculated decision.

The Manufacture of Manhood

At the heart of this recruitment apparatus lies a promise as old as the republic itself: “Send us your boy and we will return to you a man”. Craven’s investigation traces this promise from the American Revolution to the present, showing how military education has systematically cultivated a hypermasculine ideal built on hierarchy, obedience, and the performance of violence. Drawing on his investigation into the dysfunctional military school Valley Forge, he reveals an “acrid strain of masculinity that was raw, violent, fiercely hierarchical, and quickly mutating out of control”.

The architecture of this masculinity is elaborate. It begins with brutal rites of initiation that, as one study notes, use “romantic and sexual relations between boys to facilitate the cultivation of hypermasculinity”. It is sustained through “toxic masculinity or racism or misogyny or homophobia”, all of which are woven into the fabric of military socialization. And it is perpetuated by a pedagogy that teaches cadets that violence and domination are not merely acceptable but essential to being a man. The result is a contradictory ideal: “rugged individualism” channeled toward state aims of conquest and expansion; a man who is at once a disciplined follower and a self-sufficient warrior; a soldier who learns to dehumanize “the other” while becoming self-destructive.

The Human Cost of Endless War

The consequences of this system are devastating. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan produced between 2 and 3 million American service members. Thousands died in combat. But the human toll extends far beyond the battlefield. Research from the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that one out of every seven people deployed in the War on Terror experiences PTSD—among Marines, it is one in five. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that 30,177 Global War on Terror veterans have died by suicide, compared to just 7,057 who were killed in action. More service members have perished at their own hands than in combat. The suicide rate among War on Terror veterans is significantly higher than that of previous conflicts and non-veterans, driven by factors that include PTSD, depression, substance abuse, and the profound disconnect between military experience and civilian society.

The Erosion of Democratic Oversight

This human catastrophe has unfolded alongside a quiet erosion of democratic accountability. The Pentagon’s deeply embedded relationship with civilian education—through thousands of JROTC programs in high schools and ROTC units in colleges—allows the military to wield “outsized power on education”, shaping young minds long before they are eligible to vote. Meanwhile, the post-9/11 era saw recruitment standards egregiously relaxed, allowing neo-Nazis, gang members, and convicted criminals to flood the ranks. As investigative journalist Matt Kennard documents, the Pentagon knowingly empowered violent ideologues in its desperation to staff the wars, a decision that has come back to haunt the nation. Once back on American soil, many of these veterans have continued their mission through far-right organizing, race-war fantasies, and even the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Statistical analysis confirms a “statistically significant overrepresentation of veterans in right-wing extremist groups” relative to their share of the US population.

Trump, Hegseth, and the Theater of Masculinity

Into this volatile landscape has stepped Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth—both products of military education (Trump attended New York Military Academy; Hegseth, a graduate of Princeton’s ROTC program). Hegseth, in particular, has become the embodiment of a particular kind of militarized manhood. His social media accounts regularly release videos of him doing training exercises with “warriors,” speaking in bellicose language, and promising that the president will “unleash” and “untie” their hands. This spectacle has been aptly described as “masculinity theater”—a “hyper‑performative display of ‘militant masculinity’” designed to win the approval of other men rather than women.

This theater, however, masks profound fragility. Hegseth’s own memoirs reveal a man ashamed of his “soft” father, anxious that his household would not rear him effectively, and desperate to prove his toughness through military service. When the public soured on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, his hope of being elevated to “exemplar status” was dashed. The result was a rebellion fueled by alcohol abuse, Islamophobia, and misogyny.

If Craven’s book offers a sobering diagnosis, it also points to the political conclusions that follow. The Democratic Party, still emasculated from the early years of the 9/11 wars, has been unable or unwilling to challenge the military’s ideological capture. Brief attempts at reform under the Biden administration were quickly undone. Now, with Hegseth installed at the Pentagon, he has purged the military of Black and female leaders and embraced an openly violent, reactionary mentality.

The tragedy, however, is not merely political. It is cultural. The military’s monopoly on defining American manhood has created a society that reflexively adores the uniform while refusing to confront the reality of what that uniform does. Veterans feel the hollowness of this adoration—the unwillingness to engage with the darkness of war, the substitution of abstract gratitude for genuine care. As Craven notes, one of the lasting ironies of the military manhood project is that it produces men who are not secure in their masculinity, but desperate to prove it. They are trapped in a performance that can never end, because the validation they seek is always just out of reach.

America has constructed a machine for making men, and that machine is now consuming the nation from within. The question is whether we can imagine another way of being male—one not forged in violence, hierarchy, and the relentless performance of power. The cost of failing to do so is measured in suicides, in extremist violence, and in a democracy slowly strangling itself on its own militarism.

Image credit: N-Lange.de