US generals are heading back to their bases this week after an extraordinary meeting in Virginia hosted by secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and president Donald Trump. No doubt those in attendance, who are well aware of their fealty to both civilian leadership and the US Constitution, left wondering how they would convey Hegseth’s dismissal of military rules of engagement – a legal framework for conducting wars – to their troops. “There was never a time where I thought there was a threat to the Constitution, or pressure on the military to do something that was at odds with it,” Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the US Army in Europe, tells Monocle Radio. “But I’ve never seen anything like what we’re seeing now.”

According to Hodges, Hegseth’s obsession with a “warrior mentality” and his focus on male physicality will have a detrimental impact on the recruitment of women at a time when the US military can’t afford to lose recruits. “What [Hegseth] described is exactly what the Russian army is: They can do a bunch of push-ups, they have no rules of engagement, they have no respect for civilian life and they kill everything that gets in front of them,” says Hodges. “That’s not who we want to be.”

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full conversation on ‘The Globalist’.

Looking back at the meeting last week, is there anything from your career that is remotely comparable?
No, not at all. There was never a time when I thought that the Constitution was being threatened or that there was pressure on the military to do something that was at odds with our oath to it. The expectation is that nobody obeys an unlawful order and that you have a responsibility to be able to tell the difference. I’ve never seen anything like what we’re seeing now. 

Of course, there are always commanders’ conferences where some leaders get called back to Washington or to regional headquarters – but I’ve never seen a case where everyone was called back. It would have seemed preposterous at any other time.

A week after the presentation by Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, what do you think has been going through the minds of generals? What’s the mood today?
If I had been there, I would have hoped that most of the things I heard were not actually going to happen. But I would also be thinking, ‘How will I convey this to my troops? How will I convey this to my allies?’ As Commander of the US Army in Europe, my British, French, German, Polish, Finnish and Romanian counterparts would be asking, ‘What the hell is that about?’ And I would have to find a way to be loyal and respectful, explain what I thought that these policies meant and address concerns about rules of engagement because they would have an impact on our allies.

Pete Hegseth focused on the idea of the ‘warrior mentality’: physical attributes and the fitness of generals. From your perspective, how do you think that the US military and its European allies need to modernise?
It is a prerogative of every leader to lay out priorities and expectations; that’s completely normal stuff. And, for obvious reasons, being fit is an important part of that. What I didn’t like was the emphasis on male standards and the underlying tone of pure misogyny. We already don’t have enough men between the ages of 18 and 25 who can meet all of the standards to enter the armed forces, so there is a need to recruit women who want to serve. We have matured significantly over the past several decades and have been strategic in setting the physical requirements for what is pertinent to the job. So his emphasis on push-ups and that sort of thing is not relevant to his duties as secretary of defence.

Recruitment is a hot topic on both sides of the Atlantic. Do we have enough people to join our militaries? There was a conversation this week in Germany about whether conscription should return.
If we don’t want to return to a draft system and want to maintain a professional force, then the government and the defence departments are responsible for making a career in the army attractive. It also comes down to society, which must convey to its people that military service is a good thing. The German debate about Wehrpflicht – the obligation to serve in the armed forces – is becoming more positive. Almost everyone that I speak to in Frankfurt says, ‘Hell yes! Of course we should have Wehrpflicht.’ But on the contrary, you also find that most of Germany’s major universities don’t allow research and development that serves a military purpose, a holdover from the 1960s that sends a terrible signal to students and the general population about the armed forces. That does not help recruiting. 

There is one thing that Germany has done that I applaud. Most German soldiers take the train if they return home on the weekend and, if they wear their uniform, they can ride the Deutsche Bahn for free. If I’m in the train station on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, I see German Bundeswehr troops everywhere – and I think that’s a positive thing. It normalises the presence of troops.

You spoke about rules of engagement and the dilemma that you would face if you had to explain last week’s meeting to European allies. Are Europe and the US taking separate tracks?
There is a sense of divergence, yes, but not everywhere. At the headquarters of US Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, the focus remains on working with our European allies. But perhaps this is less so in Washington. Defence secretary Hegseth’s rhetoric around ‘no more stupid rules of engagement’, using the phrase ‘political correctness’ and linking rules of engagement to ‘wokeness’ concerns me. It makes no sense. Anyone who has been involved in combat or conducted operations understands that those guidelines are what keep us in compliance with the Geneva Conventions. It is not political correctness – it’s a legal framework for conducting lethal operations.

We have never won a war – and never will – by killing everybody in sight. That’s the Russian approach; they can do a bunch of push-ups, they have no rules of engagement, they have no respect for civilian life and they kill everything in front of them. Democracies fight differently. We want to produce women and men who are fit, disciplined and part of a team. I hope that the US Congress and our senior military leadership push back against this kind of dangerous thinking.

You can listen to the full interview with Ben Hodges on ‘The Globalist’. Further reading? Charlotte McDonald-Gibson argues that Quantico’s trainee US Marines aren’t ready for trumped up domestic duties and Gregory Scruggs considers the potential positives of placing the National Guard in US cities.