Will Thibeau
speaker
87 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Will Thibeau’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But it's about what the military is. The It is not a place where you necessarily deserve a fair shot at the job that you might think you deserve. It's a job where only the best is needed and where masculine virtue is absolutely necessary. And there's no greater way of laying that disparity clear than in the physical fitness test, but it is where we were told the most brazen lies.
And it's why, although this policy change, of course, by the Defense establishment is kind of, you know, tossed aside and said it's just an issue of identity politics. That's not true. It is at the core of what it means to be in the military.
And that's to maintain physical excellence and to be capable of going to what we called in the Army the limited advance with your unit, no matter the challenge ahead of you. That's what the Army Combat Fitness Test measured.
and we're finally one step closer for it to being a genuine test of physical excellence and not just a pass-fail metric before you can include all other characteristics of identity politics.
Will. Right, and that's the point. One thing that I think is worth making explicit again is, Under the Obama administration, standards became mere pass-fail metrics for the bare minimum of what it took to serve in some of these units. Even when I joined the Army, what the fitness test was, it was a means of determining who is the best and who is the rest, from first to worst.
And if you were first, you got whatever job you wanted, and you filled out the units by order of merit individually. Standards have not been that since the policy change that Secretary of Defense Hegseth describes. That's a fundamental difference when we're measuring our military on pass-fail minimum metrics as opposed to genuine excellence in the pursuit of being the best.
I'll also say, he glazed over this too, military generals, uniformed generals, recommended against this policy change even back in 2015, about 10 years ago. I would be hard-pressed to think that there are many two-, three-, and four-star generals who would put their career on the line and recommend against such a policy change today.
As I said at the start, there were many generals who lost their mind when it became clear that that women weren't performing as well under the first iteration of the Army Combat Fitness Test. And so with help from Democrat senators, the Army changed that test. So let's also use this as an occasion to ask serious questions about the military leaders who are implementing this policy.
In many cases, these are the same leaders who carried forward the Obama policy and for different units. And now we're expecting them to all of a sudden faithfully execute Trump administration policy. We need to be really careful about how that gets implemented.
perhaps a handful, but the point is, what does this do to the culture and the unit cohesion of these units? Frankly, Charlie, I can tell you firsthand That even if it's just one or two women in a large unit, that is kind of a reorganizing principle based on something other than lethality and readiness. The whole framework for how a unit trains and fights is different.
Because I was in the infantry when it became gender integrated. And there was working groups, there were new resourcing requirements, time in the woods where we would spend three weeks in the field and not really think about it too much. We're all of a sudden unique because of the different kinds of demands that men and women need when they're supposed to live in austere environments.
And obviously a lot won't make it and the vast majority won't. And there might be some that do. But does that mean that it's worth it to change the fundamental character of a war fighting formation? Again, not a McKinsey consulting class, not a Harvard Law School class, but an infantry platoon, a platoon that is meant to fight in a war no matter the consequences and no matter the conditions.
It's been a while since we've had sustained combat that looks like that. And I fear that we may naturally fall into this trap where we think 21st century values merged with 21st century warfighting. We will just assume that it works that way and that all will be the same, even if it's just a few elite, great, excellent women who can meet these standards.
Frankly, my wife was one of those women who could meet those standards, and she served alongside special operations units. That's how we met. But she would be the first to tell you that, again, the exception doesn't prove the rule. And her predilections or willingness to serve does not mean we need to change the fundamental character of previously all-male warfighting units.
I think there's still some more questions to ask here.
Yeah, thanks, Charlie. There are two critical things about Pete Hegseth. The first is he understands that the military is frankly broken and that business as usual is not going to be enough to preserve the integrity of our armed forces in a way that allows them to defend our nation. DEI has corrupted defense policy and there's a sclerotic
you know, being to everything that the military does that affects personnel to technology policy. But the second thing about him is his incentive structure is completely separate from the military industrial complex, from the senior ranks of military brass. And that means he's going to be accountable to President Trump and the American people who sent President Trump back to D.C.
in order to fix the military. That's why it's so important that he gets confirmed.
I think by any measure, Charlie. I mean, you know, I was part of the two wars that we spent 20 years fighting, and neither one yielded a legitimate military victory. You can't tell what the blood, sweat, and tears we spent in the Middle East has produced for the American people, for American interests.
The results are questionable at best, but what we see now is a military with dwindling end strength because people don't want to join and because the military doesn't want to hire the kinds of men who have served in uniform throughout our history. And, you know, the only way that we're kind of hiding the story here is because the military has changed recruitment goals.
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