Rumsfeld put in the work and was very smart. His natural disposition was such that, when given the ring of power, things went badly.

The current head of DoD is basically a manosphere influencer that bumbled into this job.

Now, I'm not an endocrinologist, just an aging guy, but from my current vantage point it appears that over the course of my life, many stupid decisions have been made that I have lived to tell about. I can't help but feel that my "wisdom of age" might just be testosterone getting out of the way.

This is all to say that our current "situation" just kinda looks like one insecure guys roid rage when you take a big step back.

It still irks me that people mocked Rumsfeld's explanation of unknown unknowns. The guy was probably a terrible excuse for a human being, but he wasn't stupid, and that quote was a pretty good explanation for why we shouldn't be overconfident in our knowledge:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

I think we're saying the same thing. I suspect there were a lot of people saying, "this probably won't work," but the Secretary of Defense pursued it anyways until real problems materialized.

Both can be true. Incompetence AND malice.

Or simpler still, although related. Maybe we just can’t afford it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/07/21/...

I'd challenge that its goal was aggressiveness. Testosterone is positively correlated with many extremely good things - energy, mood, better health, and much more. And it's inversely correlated similarly with depression, other forms of mental illness, persistent fatigue, and so on. Basically what men turn into as they age is, in large part, caused by testosterone reduction which naturally goes down as we age.

If there was some way to ensure the military had a higher end level of testosterone it would almost certainly be a very good idea. But the problem is that testosterone can't be supplemented like other things. When supplemented, your own body's production of t simply shuts down and doesn't necessarily return once the supplements end. So it creates a life-long dependency on testosterone injections, that are fairly expensive, at least in the US.

I think that aspect of it is why they most likely rolled this back. Not only do you have the issue of an army that's now dependent upon supplements for basic functioning, but you're going to have military retirees, who are already often left in a shit situation, now also dependent upon a relatively expensive treatment, forever.

This is also why I'd reform all types of US Military basic training. It's shocking to see how different the treatment is between standard basic training for US grunts vs for example, the UK.

In the UK, the things valued and required of their soldiers are far less focused on "breaking them down and building them up again", there's an order of magnitude less yelling, there's more liberty, and there's less of an "ethos to kill".

Yet the Royal Marines, having gone through this kind of training, can still regularly mog our own special forces troops and has proven that in the Fakland wars, a war they may very well be having a rd 2 in soon.

For context, US Marine basic training

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjDHoNcH5o4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9gnRQaXH38

Compare this to Royal Marine (officer) basic training:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv-pxrUNhmw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ime0t2I_eKE

There are ways of more cleverly nudging testosterone (and estrogen) production without directly supplementing. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5009465/

It will make you stronger period.

There are side effects, problems, long-term consequences...

But testosteron blood levels absolutely do regulate muscle growth.

that's why most bodybuilders take other drugs to counter the estrogen, like arimidex or aromasin. It definitely makes you bigger and stronger.

It also makes you crazy. I have a friend that took it for years. It certainly made him buff, but it also made him divorced, friendless, addicted, and unhealthy.

what if your baseline was not so much training? i assume it works by improving recovery, if not someone will need to explain what it's supposed to do to make you stronger. so, given that, your anrcdote indicates you were overtraining before t, and t reduced your recover times so that you were no longer overtraining.

but if you're working well within your ability to recover and you add t and change nothing else, how do you get stronger?

It also makes you proudly brag in public about doing absolutely idiotic things.

Do you also brag about using ChatGPT to cheat on your homework too?

It depends. It may be that more testosterone when you already produce "enough" - which is individual-dependent - won't give much additional strength if you aren't training specifically to take advantage of it. Additionally, hormones are complicated. The body will downregulate its own production when given "too much". I'm aware that bodybuilders have to follow certain treatment regimens and add other drugs to restart the body's production if they stop supplementing it at times.

IMO he obviously meant boosting someone who was low back into the normal range.

You should see what they say about Male Circumcision (it's great!), water births (bad!), Chiropractors (okay for insurance I guess?), etc

Fuck the US medical system and specifically fuck medical ethics researchers who make the american medical system so morally bankrupt.

The only person higher up the chain of command is the president.

I guess your theory does make sense.

"only 17% of dairy cows in the U.S. are now being treated with the synthetic [bGH/rbST] hormone"

It is perfectly safe for US children according to the FDA, and illegal in most other developed countries. =3

That's some kind of urban joke on 4chan yet the far more objectively cruel act of mass male circumcision at birth happens daily and hardly anyone bats an eye at it.

Why have horror movies when real life is all I need? Unironically!