Where George Washington Would Disagree with Pete Hegseth About Fitness for Command and What Makes a Warrior
When he became president, after the Revolution, Washington appointed Knox the first secretary of war – a sign of enduring confidence in his judgment and integrity.
Beards: Outward Appearance Reflects Inner Discipline
As for beards, Washington would have shared Hegseth’s concern – though for very different reasons.
He disliked facial hair on himself and on others, including his soldiers. To Washington, a beard made a man look unkempt and slovenly, masking the higher emotions that civility required.
Beards were not signs of virility but of disorder. In his words, they made a man “unsoldierlike.” Every soldier, he insisted, must appear in public “as decent as his circumstances will permit.” Each was required to have “his beard shaved – hair combed – face washed – and cloaths put on in the best manner in his power.”
For Washington, this was no trivial matter. Outward appearance reflected inner discipline. He believed that a well-ordered body produced a well-ordered mind.
To him, neatness was the visible expression of self-command, the foundation of every other virtue a soldier and leader should possess.
That is why he equated beards and other forms of unkemptness with “indecency.” His lifelong battle was against indecency in all its forms. “Indecency,” he once wrote, was “utterly inconsistent with that delicacy of character, which an officer ought under every circumstance to preserve.”
More Statesman Than Warrior
By “delicacy,” Washington meant modesty, tact and self-awareness – the poise that set genuine leaders apart from individuals governed by passions.
For him, a soldier’s first victory was always over himself.
“A man attentive to his duty,” he wrote, “feels something within him that tells him the first measure is dictated by that prudence which ought to govern all men who commits a trust to another.”
In other words, Washington became a soldier not because he was hotheaded or drawn to the thrill of combat, but because he saw soldiering as the highest exercise of discipline, patience and composure. His “warrior ethos” was moral before it was martial.
Washington’s ideal military leader was more statesman than warrior. He believed that military power must be exercised under moral constraint, within the bounds of public accountability, and always with an eye to preserving liberty rather than winning personal glory.
In his mind, the army was not a caste apart but an instrument of the republic – an arena in which self-command and civic virtue were tested. Later generations would call him the model of the “republican general”: a commander whose authority rested not on bluster or bravado but on composure, prudence and restraint.
That vision was the opposite of the one Pete Hegseth performed at Quantico.
Discipline and Steadiness, Not Fury and Bravado
The “warrior ethos” Hegseth celebrates – loud, performative – was precisely what Washington believed a soldier must overcome.
In March 1778, after Marquis de Lafayette abandoned an impossible winter expedition to Canada, Washington praised caution over juvenile bravado.
“Every one will applaud your prudence in renouncing a project in which you would vainly have attempted physical impossibilities,” he wrote from the snows of Valley Forge.
For Washington, valor was never the same as recklessness. Success, he believed, depended on foresight, not fury, and certainly not bravado.
The first commander in chief cared little for waistlines or whiskers, in the end; what concerned him was discipline of the mind. What counted was not the cut of a man’s figure but the steadiness of his judgment.
Washington’s own “warrior ethos” was grounded in decency, temperance and the capacity to act with courage without surrendering to rage. That ideal built an army – and in time, a republic.
Maurizio Valsania is Professor of American History, Università di Torino. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.
