Pete Hegseth Is America’s New Secretary of Pestilence

Kangxi’s dynasty, the Qing, were Manchu, a steppe people who had conquered China in 1644. They had no concept of germ theory, but they could observe that the Chinese, living in far more crowded settlements than the northern nomads, often got the milder form of smallpox when young. Kangxi arranged for his whole family to be variolated, an early form of immunization in which healthy individuals were deliberately inoculated. In 1681, he ordered the same for the Manchu armies, eventually immunizing more than 4 million troops and their relatives.

Nearly 350 years later, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s grasp of science and military logistics appears considerably worse than Kangxi’s. Hegseth has just made the annual flu vaccine for U.S. soldiers no longer mandatory, claiming that the abolition of the mandate is a victory for freedom. Centuries of military history demonstrate with brutal clarity what a stupid idea this is.

Armies have carried disease with them since recorded history began. The Plague of Athens— probably typhoid fever or typhus—which wrecked the city in 430 B.C., was carried by Athenian sailors and besieging Spartan soldiers. In A.D. 165, Roman armies brought smallpox back with them from the eastern reaches of the empire, killing between 5 million and 10 million people.

At the Battle of Red Cliffs in 208, the army of the Chinese warlord Cao Cao was fatally weakened by an outbreak of fever, forcing him to retreat. Armies that took medical precautions, like the Qing troops, had an advantage over unshielded foes. When the Qing exterminated the Dzungar Mongols in 1755, two-fifths of the population had already fallen to smallpox.

The military is a fantastic vector for epidemics. Soldiers are pressed together in close quarters, often with poor sanitation. Wounded troops are more vulnerable to infection, and premodern medical treatment, with its blood-stained saws and unwashed hands, worsened their chances. Armies also travel and conquer, discovering new and exciting diseases along the way. Until the 20th century, it was routine for armies to lose more men to illness than to the enemy.

The United States was no exception. Disease was the main killer of Civil War soldiers and World War I doughboys alike. It wasn’t until World War II that the pattern was reversed. In World War I, flu was the country’s biggest killer, claiming 45,000 U.S. military dead—and another 600,000 or more civilians. The 1918 pandemic moved between Europe and the Americas on troopships, sickening between 20 and 40 percent of U.S. military personnel as it travelled. It became known as the Spanish flu because Spain, a neutral in the war, released the numbers of its dead while combatants tried to hide their figures for fear of signaling how fragile their armies had become.

Since the United States was founded, its leaders have tried to reduce the toll that disease took on armies. George Washington, like Kangxi a century earlier, ordered his troops inoculated against smallpox, reasoning that the 2 percent death rate of primitive inoculation was far better than losing a third of his men to the disease. U.S. doctors and generals turned the tide against disease in World War II thanks to vaccinations, newly developed antibiotics, and an enormous medical-military bureaucracy.

The relative lack of epidemics among militaries today is thanks to decades of work by doctors. The Republican Party’s war on vaccines, spearheaded by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and endorsed by Hegseth, could undo that. To be sure, modern medicine makes outbreaks less dangerous, but even when it doesn’t kill soldiers, being sick makes them—like anyone else—more sluggish.

Soldiers also spread disease to local civilians, with disastrous health and public relations consequences. Take Haiti, where Nepali peacekeepers, deployed by the United Nations in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, brought cholera back to a country that hadn’t seen the disease for a century. A single camp with poor sanitation caused an outbreak that sickened more than 800,000 people and killed nearly 10,000. The U.N. claimed the outbreak had nothing to do with its peacekeepers until 2016 and after grudgingly acknowledging responsibility botched the attempt to provide aid. It’s easy to imagine a Hegsethian army doing the same on the ground in Iran or Cuba.

The idea that compulsory vaccination limits soldiers’ freedom is at odds with the entire historical, legal, and cultural framework of the U.S. military. The lives of service members are governed by restrictions that don’t apply to civilians: on their travel, on their health, on their personal security, on their hygiene and grooming, even on their right to cheat on their spouses. Even numerous other vaccination requirements still stand—for now.

So why has Hegseth made this epochally dangerous decision? Part of the reason is the strange politics of the MAGA movement. To bring RFK Jr. and his followers on board, Donald Trump publicly disowned his own remarkably successful COVID-19 vaccine effort in favor of anti-vaccination conspiracies.

But the decision also ties into Hegseth’s own vision of the military, where white masculinity is valued above expertise or experience. Hegseth and his clique are obsessed with the idea of the warfighter, the hard man who makes hard decisions. The warfighter’s hard body will not succumb to such womanly problems as disease; his precious bodily fluids will not be polluted by the penetrating needle. These psychosocial delusions tie in with the eugenicist politics of RFK Jr., where nature will wipe out the unworthy.

The defense secretary has already attempted to illegally retitle himself as the secretary of war. Give viruses time, and another biblical horseman may be a better fit.