US Army personnel take part in a LGBTQIA+ rally in San Diego, 2017. For representational purposes.
Credit: iStock Photo
Doral, Fla: President Donald Trump on Monday moved toward pushing openly transgender people out of the military, directed the Pentagon to end diversity programs and ordered the reinstatement of many service members dismissed for refusing the coronavirus vaccine as he sought to reshape America’s armed forces.
The directives, contained in a batch of executive orders, advanced what Trump and his new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have described as an effort to return the military to an unapologetically masculine professional culture, while rejecting the sorts of equitable hiring and staffing practices that Hegseth has blamed for lowering the military’s standards and warfighting capacity.
In some respects, the orders Monday mirrored others Trump signed last week aimed at eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government and limiting government recognition of an individual’s gender to their sex at birth.
But the new guidance related to gender went much further by authorizing the Defense Department to potentially bar transgender soldiers by considering identifying as a gender other than the one assigned at birth an impediment to the physical and mental well-being necessary for military service.
“Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” the order said. “Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” the order added.
While the order did not immediately exclude anyone from military service, it gave the Pentagon 60 days to update its policy on medical standards and 30 days to come forward with revised guidance on how to implement the vision in the order.
In separate orders, Trump also directed the Pentagon to reverse course on diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and to offer many of the 8,000 service members discharged from the military over vaccine mandates back pay.
The three actions from the president came as Hegseth, following his confirmation Saturday, pledged to preside over more profound changes, including reorienting the military into an expanded role enforcing Trump’s immigration policies and deportation campaigns.
“Whatever is needed at the border will be provided,” Hegseth told reporters after arriving at the Pentagon on Monday for his first full day on the job. “This is a shift. It’s not the way business has been done in the past.”
Trump also signed a fourth order Monday that set in motion plans to develop a next-generation missile defense system that the order likened to Israel’s iron dome — the air defense capabilities that intercept rockets and missiles frequently fired into Israel’s airspace.
In public remarks Monday, Trump and Hegseth hailed the new system as a significant expansion of the United States’ defense capabilities, which would likely be among the most sophisticated in the world given the geographic area it would cover.
According to the order, titled “The Iron Dome for America,” the new system was conceived of as finalizing a vision first pursued by former President Ronald Reagan, whose Strategic Defense Initiative missile defense system, nicknamed “Star Wars,” involved overambitious objectives and was never completed.
The proposed system would be designed to guard against a variety of ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles, which have been successfully deployed by adversaries such as Russia, and which the White House described as “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.”
The order granted the Pentagon 60 days to submit details for the plan, which included accelerating development of US hypersonic missiles and “space-based interceptors.”