The Conversion of St. Augustine by Fra Angelico (Public Domain / Wikimedia)
Sightings | Oct 15, 2025
On September 30th, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addressed the full assembly of U.S. General and Flag officers in Quantico, Virginia. He began his remarks with the motto of the unit where he started his military career: “Those who long for peace must prepare for war.” An old Army adage, it originates from a Roman treatise by Vegetius, primarily about the logistics of training, equipping, organizing, and deploying the legions. But Hegseth’s focus wasn’t on logistics, equipment, or even the projection of power. The Secretary was clear: “This speech today is about people … The topic today is about the nature of ourselves.”
More than a policy outline, Hegseth’s remarks were a moral manifesto on what a warfighter should be. This concern is not new. Across history, whether it has been framed as arete in ancient Greece, as honor, as chivalry, or now, as Hegseth terms it, the “warrior ethos,” the concern is the same: virtue — specifically, the virtue of human beings enmeshed in the fraught and consequential profession of arms.
In his speech, Hegseth framed military virtue in largely Christian terms. He invoked the notion of “imago Dei,” the idea that all humans are made in God’s image, to emphasize the equality of American citizens. He quoted extensively from the Sermon on the Mount (though not the “blessed are the peacemakers” part), using the language of the “plank in our own eyes” to address failures of leadership among commanders, and reformulated the Golden Rule to criticize “fat troops” in formations and “fat generals and admirals” in the Pentagon.
Despite the scriptural references, Hegseth’s understanding of the warrior ethos conflicts sharply with much of Christian tradition’s view of virtue, particularly as articulated by St. Augustine, whose work underpins the Western Just War Tradition. Though commonly understood as moral considerations for the commencement and conduct of war, the Just War Tradition, especially in the Augustinian vein, is fundamentally concerned with the character of the warrior and the connection of individual virtue to the profession of arms.
Hegseth sees the warrior not just as someone tasked with a unique role in society, but as belonging to an entirely different class of creature. In his book The War on Warriors, he discusses warriors if not as a totally different species, at least as a different breed of human being. Hegseth describes this breed of person as “the sort of men vital to defending us,” and as “red-blooded American men” who stand in contrast to “elite candy asses.” Interestingly, his warrior exemplar is not a flesh-and-blood Medal of Honor recipient like Desmond Doss, Daniel Inouye, or Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, but rather the fictional quasi-superhero John McClane from Die Hard.
In his Quantico speech, Hegseth doubled down: the virtue of the warfighter lies in their ability to “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.” Such people, he argues, “do not necessarily belong always in polite society.” They exist apart and are judged apart from the values of that society. Warriors, in Hegseth’s view, constitute a world — a morality — unto themselves and thus have a virtue all their own.
Indeed, beyond vague appeals to love of peace and country, Hegseth rejects any wider societal concerns for the warfighter. Shortly after taking office, Hegseth ordered sweeping changes to U.S. service academies, institutions historically tasked with the education and character formation of military officers. Curricula, he tweeted, would now focus on “history, engineering, and warfighting,” seemingly placing the humanities and the role they play in the moral formation of good officers and citizens in the proverbial cross-hairs. In his speech, Hegseth was more explicit about his disdain for concerns other than victory on the battlefield. He criticized the “ridiculous amount of mandatory training… PowerPoint presentations, and… online courses” that service members go through — referring, in coded terms, to trainings on sexual harassment, racial sensitivity, and religious respect. Instead, he says, preparation should mean “more time in the motor pool and on the range.”
Warriors, he claims, should be free to “kill people and break things,” unburdened by “overbearing rules of engagement” or concerns over collective issues like climate change, social justice, or the diverse identities within the military. He describes such concerns as “distractions”—or, more bluntly, “shit.” His ideal warrior is unrestrained, untethered, and unbothered: an instrument of “maximum lethality” whose hands he personally seeks to untie so they can “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”
Augustine offers a stark contrast. In Contra Faustum, he writes, “The real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power.” The impulses Hegseth elevates are those Augustine explicitly condemns. Indeed, Augustine goes on to say that “it is generally to punish these things… that good men undertake wars.”
The impulses Hegseth elevates are those Augustine explicitly condemns.
It is telling that Augustine writes not of “good warriors,” but of “good men.” This distinction is critical. Warrior virtue, for Augustine, is not a separate category of moral excellence, but a subset of human virtue more broadly. Military virtue is part of a wider moral order in which community concerns, the exigencies of common life, and the inescapability of the human condition press on the warrior and non-warrior alike.
Some scholars emphasize the office of the warrior as particularly salient in Augustine’s ethics of war and warriors. However, my own mentor, Richard B. Miller, points out that it is a mistake to understand Augustinian ethics in this way. For Miller, Augustine does not authorize a warrior to use force because of their office. Rather, their suitability for the role itself comes from their ability to properly embody the virtue of love, that is, to order their loves rightly—subordinating love of self and nation to love of neighbor and God. Good people who undertake wars do not become something separate from their fellow humans; they remain grounded in the same moral framework binding all human beings and are called to embody the same virtues at an even higher level of proficiency.
Within an Augustinian framework, Hegseth’s model of the unrestrained warrior is not a paragon of virtue. For Hegseth, the warrior’s being and therefore their virtue is defined by their role and capacity for violence. For Augustine, the warrior is first and foremost a human being—a child of God whose humanity is shared with both friend and foe, whose moral responsibilities are not erased by war, but intensified.
The warrior does not become a law unto themself, judged by a separate standard. Rather, they must strive to remain a good person who undertakes a tragic duty. They must be “more than conquerors.” They must treat violence not as their natural purview or as a positive good, but always as a tragic concession to a fallen world. For Augustine, then, the virtue of the warfighter is not measured by martial prowess, but by well-ordered love, love that must manifest outwardly in the self-restraint, humility, and humanity with which the warfighter approaches their duty.
Featured image from Fra Angelico and workshop, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Rev. Dr. John Marc Singhio (Courtesy Photo)
The Rev. Dr. John Marc Sianghio, a United Methodist pastor, is Assistant Director and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University (CSRC). He holds an M.Div. and Ph.D. in Religious Ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He proudly served in Operation Enduring Freedom as a Human Terrain Analyst for 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division and as a member of the Civil-Military Operations Advisory Team for 3rd Squadron (RSTA), 89th Cavalry Regiment.