There's also the relevant details that we don't live at a time in which being extremely muscular and full of aggressiveness (which is what the testosterone policy was meant to cause) makes one a good soldier. Being healthy and able to exert a lot of physical effort is absolutely needed, but beyond that not much is gained.

To put it mildly, no matter how pumped up with hormones one is, one cannot outrun an explosion (much less a thermobaric one), a sniper firing from hundreds of meters away or, for that matter, a drone swarm. For those kinds of challenge other traits are needed.

And these required traits are dismissed as unimportant, just witness all the extremely competent military personal, including medal recipients, who were dismissed or made to "voluntarily" resign due to stuff that had no bearing whatsoever on whether they were good soldiers or not.

Note: I'm not American and, from the perspective of my country's own national interests, which tend to be at odds with the US's more often than not, it's a good thing the US is doing all of this, since it's making itself weaker. But from a personal perspective, that I find it quite sad, I do. I have too many American friends for me not to worry about what this will cause them on the long run.

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