What is ‘woke’ as US Defence secretary Pete Hegseth declares end to ‘woke’ culture in the military

After summoning hundreds of US military officials to an in-person meeting on Tuesday (September 30), US defence secretary Pete Hegseth declared an end to “woke” culture in the military. He also announced new directives for troops that include “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness.

Mr Hegseth and President Donald Trump had abruptly called military leaders from around the world to convene at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, near Washington, without publicly revealing the reason until this morning.

Mr Hegseth’s address largely focused on his own, long-used, talking points that painted a picture of a military that has been hamstrung by “woke” policies, and he said military leaders should “do the honourable thing and resign” if they do not like his new approach.

Admirals and generals from conflict zones in the Middle East and elsewhere were summoned for a lecture on race and gender in the military, underscoring the extent to which the country’s culture wars have emerged as a front-and-centre agenda item for Mr Hegseth’s Pentagon, even at a time of broad national security concerns across the globe.

During his nearly hour-long speech, Mr Hegseth said the US military has promoted too many leaders for the wrong reasons based on race, gender quotas and “historic firsts”. “The era of politically correct, overly sensitive don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now at every level,” Mr Hegseth said.

Mr Hegseth said the department has been told from previous administrations that “our diversity is our strength”, which he called an “insane fallacy”. “They had to put out dizzying DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and LGBTQE+ statements. They were told females and males are the same thing, or that males who think they’re females is totally normal,” he said, adding the use of electric tanks and the Covid vaccine requirements to the list as mistaken policies.

Mr Hegseth said this is not about preventing women from serving. “But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” he said. “If women can make it, excellent, if not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result.”

What does woke mean?

The old meaning of the word ‘woke’ is simply the ‘past participle of wake’, as in to wake up, or awaken, but in a modern sense, the meaning of the word has changed and in 2017, the new meaning of the word woke was officially added to the dictionary. Described by Merriam-Webster as “chiefly US slang”, the dictionary defines the word as: “Aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”.

Used since the 1930s or earlier, the word referred to an awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction ‘stay woke’. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke trending across social media.

Over time, ‘woke’ has been used to refer not only to issues of race, but to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. In the US, ‘woke’ has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery.

In 2014, ‘stay woke’ was popularised by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, raising awareness of police shootings of African Americans. Following this, the term was increasingly adopted by those wishing to signal their support for progressive causes, becoming popular with millennials and Gen Z.

Since 2019, ‘stay woke’ is often used as a pejorative by those with a right-leaning political persuasion to disparage leftist and progressive movements as superficial and insincere.