The MAHA Pentagon

Why the U.S. military must adopt MAHA principles to close the human-performance gap.

Not all health interventions are created equal. Some fade into irrelevance, footnotes in the endless churn of wellness culture. Others reshape the healthcare landscape by redefining the field of human performance. The Make America Healthy Again movement, which prioritizes metabolic health over the standard American diet and embraces biohacking and neurohacking more readily than conventional medicine, belongs unmistakably in this latter category. Yet unlike previous health revolutions, which diffused slowly through civilian institutions, MAHA now commands the regulatory apparatus of federal health policy: Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HHS, Dr. Mehmet Oz at CMS, Dr. Marty Makary at FDA, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at NIH.

This revolution has, quite literally, arrived in Washington, and last month’s MAHA Summit was its coronation. The summit was a who’s who of human performance innovation: panels on brain-computer interfaces, food as medicine, and reversing aging; keynotes from Vice President Vance and Secretary Kennedy; Walmart executives sharing stages with biohackers.

The guest list, however, had a hole in it. Conspicuously absent? A single representative from the Department of War. The institution responsible for the health and performance of 2.1 million servicemembers had no seat at the table where America’s health future was being mapped.

This presents a dangerous contradiction for American military power: our strategic future increasingly depends on cognitive sharpness, physical resilience, sustained operational capacity, yet the institution responsible for projecting American power feeds its force industrial slop and prohibits compounds that its most elite operators already use behind closed doors. The gap between MAHA’s vision of optimized human health and the reality facing millions of servicemembers represents both a readiness crisis and a long-term fiscal catastrophe.

Servicemembers face a depressing reality when it comes to human performance. Military dining facilities and on-base vendors remain dominated by 1990s-era fast food concepts. Food service contracts optimize for cost-per-plate, not nutritional outcomes. Troops in the field receive MREs: highly processed, shelf-stable products engineered for logistics, not performance. A 2024 GAO audit found systemic failures across DoW nutrition programs. At sixteen of nineteen dining facilities examined, food service staff had not been trained on notionally mandatory nutrition labeling programs.

The costs cascade predictably. Suboptimal nutrition degrades physical performance, cognitive function, and recovery. A soldier consuming seed-oil-laden processed foods will underperform a soldier eating whole foods in strength, endurance, reaction time, decision-making. Poor nutrition contributes to musculoskeletal injuries, the leading cause of medical evacuation and training attrition. Military service patterns establish metabolic dysfunction that manifests as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in veterans. The VA budget now exceeds $400 billion annually. Much of this represents the long-term bill for short-term nutritional negligence.

The Special Operations community offers a sliver of hope. Through the Preservation of the Force and Families (POTFF) program, SOF units now embed strength and conditioning coaches, performance dietitians, sports medicine physicians, and mental performance specialists at the unit level. Fort Bragg’s dining facilities serve food that MAHA advocates would recognize, like whole proteins and vegetables. A peer-reviewed study found these interventions significantly improved diet quality as measured by the Healthy Eating Index. Big Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness (H2F) program extends this model to conventional forces, embedding similar specialists at brigade level.

But the optimization extends beyond nutrition. Multiple sources within the SOF community confirmed to the author that operators are already using compounds like BPC-157, a synthetic peptide with remarkable tissue repair properties, despite its unapproved status. This creates an uncomfortable reality: America’s most elite warriors self-administer substances that DoW officially prohibits.

The scientific foundation exists to support a change in policy. One example: peer-reviewed research on Neuropeptide Y (NPY) during SERE training found that Special Forces soldiers exhibited higher NPY levels under stress than conventional soldiers, with NPY correlating positively with behavioral performance and negatively with PTSD symptoms. NPY is a peptide naturally produced in the brain known to regulate stress responses. Stress resilience has biochemical components. The question is whether we will study and leverage these biomarkers, or cede the domain to adversaries who will.

While DoW debates whether to study peptides, China races ahead. According to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, “U.S. intelligence shows that China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.” A 2025 report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology warned that China’s Military-Civil Fusion doctrine systematically integrates biological enhancement with AI-driven warfare. “Drone warfare will seem quaint,” the Commission stated, “if we are faced with genetically enhanced PLA super-soldiers.”

Beyond the exotic, China has captured key pharmaceutical supply chains. The United States depends on foreign manufacturing, much of it Chinese, for active pharmaceutical ingredients. In a conflict, our ability to produce performance-enhancing compounds could be interdicted. This is not theoretical. It is the logical extension of supply chain vulnerabilities already evident in semiconductors and rare earth minerals. We must face the reality that China may bring soldiers with simply better cognitive and physical performance to the fight, with major implications for the prospects of victory.

We propose a structured integration of MAHA principles into DoW human performance programs, beginning with achievable near-term reforms and building toward comprehensive transformation.

First, overhaul dining facility contracts. DoW should revise food service requirements to mandate MAHA-aligned nutritional standards: eliminate seed oils, reduce ultra-processed ingredients, and increase whole food availability. Performance metrics must shift from cost-per-plate to nutritional quality and readiness outcomes. This requires no new legislation, only acquisition reform and leadership prioritization.

Second, leverage AI-driven biomarker coaching to deliver POTFF and H2F-style health optimization to all 2.1 million servicemembers at a fraction of the cost. POTFF and H2F have found success, but they require embedded strength coaches, dietitians, and cognitive specialists at brigade level, a model that cannot scale to the entire force without tens of billions in additional personnel costs. Guard and Reserve forces are particularly underserved, seeing their units only a few days per month with no access to the embedded specialists available to active duty counterparts. Here is where DoW can leapfrog its own legacy programs. Commercial offerings like Superpower and Function Health now combine comprehensive biomarker panels with AI that translates results into personalized diet, exercise, and supplement protocols. This means individualized health guidance for under $200 per servicemember per year, a capability that simply did not exist when POTFF and H2F were originally designed.

Third, authorize controlled research on performance peptides and speed their use in the field. The Secretary of War should issue waiver authority for DoW-funded studies of BPC-157, Semax, and similar compounds in military populations. This acknowledges the reality of existing use while generating the safety and efficacy data needed for informed policy. DoW should partner with HHS, NIH, and the FDA to create joint research programs to accelerate this further. The Neuropeptide Y studies on SERE resilience provide a model; this framework should be expanded to tissue repair and cognitive enhancement compounds. Similarly, DoW should encourage more performance peptide experimentation at the edge: it will frequently be the case that the man in the field finds a new opportunity faster than our formal scientific apparatus. This does not mean abandoning safety: mandatory reporting protocols, medical oversight, and centralized tracking can generate the data needed to separate signal from noise while protecting servicemembers from genuine harm.

Fourth, reindustrialize domestic biotech production. Work with the Department of Commerce and aggressively use the authorities under the Defense Production Act to onshore manufacturing of critical peptides and pharmaceutical ingredients. This serves both military readiness and the broader MAHA goal of reducing dependence on compromised foreign supply chains. Strategic autonomy in human performance compounds is no less critical than strategic autonomy in semiconductors or critical minerals.

The MAHA movement and the Pentagon share a fundamental interest: optimizing human performance. MAHA advocates understand that industrial food and regulatory capture have degraded American health. Military leaders understand that suboptimal soldiers create readiness gaps and long-term liabilities. The precedent already exists in USSOCOM. The regulatory allies now hold institutional power. The strategic threat from China is unambiguous.

What we need is the willpower to solve this problem decisively. The troops deserve better than 1990s fast food and the prohibition on compounds they use anyway. The taxpayers deserve better than a $400 billion VA bill inflated by preventable chronic disease. National security demands better than ceding the human performance domain to adversaries who will not hesitate. It is time to Make the U.S. Military Healthy Again.