Testosterone Screening Is Preventive Medicine for the US Military | Opinion

Just a few days ago, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said, “We owe our warriors the absolute best medical care in the world, and this program delivers on that obligation.”

On the medicine, he is right. Under the July 15 directive, “all Active Duty and Reserve Component personnel aged 30 and older” will have testosterone measured once a year as part of the Periodic Health Assessment they already sit for. Troops under 30 may request the test. If a result comes back low and a military physician recommends treatment, the service member decides whether to accept it.

The problem, “low T,” has a military history that predates this Pentagon and this administration. In 2020, the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine described “Operator Syndrome”, the various medical and behavioral conditions produced by the extraordinary wear and tear of a career in special operations. Hormonal dysfunction sits on that list alongside traumatic brain injury, sleep disturbance, chronic pain, and depression. The conclusion? Blast exposure and chronic stress dysregulate the endocrine system, and low testosterone shows up as fatigue, low mood, poor concentration, and disrupted sleep.

And this is not, as some coverage implied, a program for men only. Hegseth said “service member,” not “serviceman.” That matters because testosterone is not a male-only hormone. Women produce it too, and clinical evidence ties low levels in women to diminished energy, mood, cognition, and bone density, while supplementing with low doses of testosterone is linked with healthy aging in women.

Service members are not the average American. They accumulate an unusually high burden of the very things that suppress testosterone: chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and head trauma. That last one is not a hunch. A population-based study of active-duty men found that a history of traumatic brain injury more than doubled the odds of hypogonadism. All Secretary Hegseth did was recognize that low testosterone might affect far more than the special forces, and that it degrades readiness across the ranks just as surely as the cholesterol and blood-pressure numbers the Department of War already tracks.

Nor is Hegseth moving in isolation. Across the river at the Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made falling testosterone a major concern, calling declining levels in young men an “existential” problem. In June 2026, HHS asked the FDA to revise the labels on testosterone replacement therapy, striking the part of the label that ultimately discouraged treating age-related low testosterone and narrowing the prostate-cancer contraindication after new data, including the 5,200-man TRAVERSE trial, found no meaningful rise in cardiovascular events. That built on a December 2025 FDA expert panel which urged broader indications and lighter restrictions on testosterone replacement therapy. The screening of troops is one piece of a broader federal turn toward taking low testosterone seriously.

And this effort has been building for a few years. Representative Jimmy Panetta, a California Democrat, pushed for a five-year Pentagon study of testosterone in special-operations forces during the last National Defense Authorization Act. The study didn’t survive the final agreement, and it was replaced by a directed briefing on existing treatments and testing protocols. But Panetta’s point stood: surveys of veterans and active-duty troops pointed to a link between the stress of service and falling testosterone, and the military needed to do something about it.

In May 2024, Bu Yeap and colleagues published a meta-analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine, capturing prospective cohort studies of community-dwelling men whose hormones were measured by mass spectrometry. Across the pooled data, men whose baseline testosterone fell below 213 nanograms per deciliter died at higher rates from all causes, even after adjusting for age, body-mass index, smoking, activity, diabetes, and much more. The research found that below 153, cardiovascular death climbed. Low testosterone is one of the more durable mortality predictors that goes unmeasured in young men.

Service members fight and die for their fellow Americans, and they have the physical, emotional, and mental scars from it. Many of these scars are permanent and unchanging. But low testosterone is an easy item to screen for and treat. Rather than deride the decision, Americans should applaud Secretary Hegseth for making the change that will protect service members, their families, and ultimately, all Americans.

Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) was the governor of Louisiana from 2008-2016 and a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Keith Kellogg is a retired Army Lieutenant General who was an assistant to the president and national security advisor to Vice President Mike Pence.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.