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If posts coming from the White House were to be believed, the US-Israel war on Iran looks something like scenes from Top Gun, Braveheart and Deadpool – or how a fifth-grade boy might imagine combat. The Trump administration has also presented Operation Epic Fury as a video game, borrowing gen Z parlance to describe the US armed forces as “locked in” on the conflict.

Such macho posturing squares with secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s desire to bring “warrior culture” back to the military. The former Fox News host has railed against DEI, “fat troops” and “beardos” (troops with beards), and envisioned a military full of “the right people” who fit his imposed standards of virility and masculinity.

But a look beyond official channels indicates that at least some service members active on TikTok – a subset of an online space known as #MilitaryTok – are not channeling Trump and his administration’s warrior mentality. Instead, their posts convey vulnerability, anxiety, and in many cases, snark over the prospect of shipping out to the Middle East.

As Trump flirts with the idea of a ground invasion while paradoxically declaring the war will be over “very shortly”, and as official sources give scant reliable updates, these posts also fill an information void, however imperfectly. #MilitaryTok has helped the public guess at troop movements and gauge morale, especially among younger gen Z members.

All told, it’s an intimate, if memeified, accounting of the US-Iran conflict from the perspective of those who might have to fight it.

New recruits have poked fun at their own timing, joining up mid-war or right before it started.

One national guard member wrote: “joining the military in the middle of a war bc im a #youngho”. (“Young ho” on TikTok describes a woman who takes shortcuts to get what she wants; joining the military might be seen as a pathway to opportunities she wouldn’t have at home.) “I took YOLO too seriously,” reads the joking caption from another young woman getting sworn in to the national guard “in the middle of a war”. One user mouthed along to lines from the 2005 Gulf war drama Jarhead about being “dumb enough” to sign a military contract. “All that for BAH,” she wrote in the caption, referring to the housing allowance given to service people.

Some service members have also expressed their thoughts outside the language of memes, focusing on the impact of deployment on loved ones.

A man in the army wrote on TikTok that he was deploying soon “and all [he could] think about” is his infant child. A day after the first US drone strike on Iran on 1 March, a woman in fatigues wrote about “the saxophones getting louder as my mom watched the news yesterday knowing her daughter’s in the military”. (On TikTok, “the saxophones” refers to a moment of rising tension and impending doom, like the soundtrack to an 80s thriller.)

And as a violent March unfolded in the Middle East, The Village People’s disco track In the Navy took over #MilitaryTok.

In the song, singer Victor Willis trepidatiously responds to a recruiter urging him to join the navy: “What am I going to do in a submarine?” That riff has taken over the app, with service members lip-syncing and dancing along, perhaps indicating their own hesitancy – or maybe they are just having fun. In one video liked more than 55,000 times, a marine mouths the words while dramatically holding her head in her hand. “When they’re really talking about deploying us,” she captioned the clip. Young, non-enlisted users have used the song in TikToks noting the presence of military recruiters on school campuses, a practice viewed by academics and advocates as predatory.

The Village People, who performed at Trump’s inauguration (the president’s love of YMCA is the stuff of meme gold), joined in, posting: “this generation yearns for disco.” The US navy nearly used In the Navy for recruitment videos in the 1980s with permission from the band but decided against it; the song has long been associated with gay sex in the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

A representative for Blue Star Families, a non-profit that supports the families of serving military members and veterans, wrote in an email that it is seeing “a mix of humor, lived experience, and real-time reactions to current events” on TikTok. “What stands out is how Gen Z service members and veterans are engaging; it’s less formal and more personal perspective layered with irony or dark humor.”

Those #MilitaryTok posts that employ gallows humor while speculating about ground invasion reflect broader attitudes towards the war: a Pew poll published last week found that six in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict, with 40% reporting the war will make the US less safe in the long run. More than 3,500 people in Iran and 13 US service members have been killed in the conflict.

#MilitaryTok has exploded in recent years, which is both good and bad news for military recruiting efforts among gen Z.

The Department of Defense understands that positive posts about military life can be more effective than snazzily dressed military recruiters who post up in mall parking lots and school cafeterias promising teens a better life. Hegseth’s recruitment taskforce has called on military influencers to hawk the lifestyle, paying for some to visit DC to celebrate the army’s 250th birthday last June.

“TikTok can function like promotional materials for the military,” said Jeremiah Favara, a professor at Gonzaga University and author of Tactical Inclusion: Difference and Vulnerability in US Military Advertising, “but it’s also out of their control. Service members or veterans can speak their minds and share things that actually do not align with the military’s PR and advertising strategy.”

Army rules encourage soldiers and their families to use social media “to stay connected and to tell the Army’s story”. There are basic best practices: do not post or like any content that goes against a soldier’s code of conduct, such as disrespecting supervisors or sharing sensitive information. They are prohibited from depicting hazing, bullying, harassment or discrimination. (Instances of hazing in the army reportedly increased after Hegseth proposed rolling back on military harassment reforms.) The navy and air force reminded troops that they can discuss politics online as long as it is clear they are speaking from personal perspective. Many #MilitaryTok influencers with larger followings put some version of “not affiliated with the DoD” in their profile bios.

But these guidelines may fail to reel in the more confessional impulses of TikTok.

Military members who muse about an impending deployment are often flooded with comments accusing them of violating Operations Security (OPSEC), the official term for “loose lips sink ships”. A civilian went viral this week for inadvertently sharing (totally unverified) military plans: San Diego stripper and influencer Charm Daze, who says she works at a club near US military bases, reported an influx of servicemen. “It’s sad, they’re like, kind of depressed,” she said, before suggesting they came in for a last night of fun before deployment.

It also might be difficult for service people to take social media rules seriously when the White House communicates war updates through Grand Theft Auto memes.

“The military is very keen on maintaining a sense of integrity, and that diverges really dramatically from what the administration is doing,” Roger Stahl, a writer, producer and professor who studies propaganda at the University of Georgia.

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After it failed to meet recruitment goals in 2022, experts worried about the future of the US armed forces. But by 2025 the military had exceeded its recruiting goals. Trump and Hegseth take credit but it started during Biden’s presidency – and women, not men, led the surge. (In 2024, women’s recruitment increased 18%, while men saw an 8% bump.) Experts credit an advertisement blitz and the creation of a course that helps aspiring service members get test scores up and body weight down.

Still, gen Z has a less-than-favorable view of the military; a Department of Defense poll found that positive attitudes toward the armed forces among the cohort dropped from 46% in 2016 to 35% in 2021. A more recent poll from March conducted by SocialSphere’s Gen Z Tracker, an opinion research consultancy, found that 34% of gen Z recipients strongly opposed war in Iran; only 9% strongly supported it.

Today’s 18-year-olds were born in 2008. It’s not difficult to see why a younger generation of service members that has known nearly endless American war might indulge in unfiltered posting. As one army member, shown throwing her patrol cap down in anger, posted to TikTok: “POV: you believed ur recruiter, now u regretting everything.”

Lisa Ellen Silvestri, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of Friended at the Front: Social Media in the American War Zone, started studying the topic during the Iraq war.

“Social media is interesting, because it’s supposed to be a personal account, but what I’ve found through my previous research is that [servicemembers] are always on duty, so even if they’re not posting in the capacity of a soldier, they still are [perceived as such],” Silvestri said. “There’s a weight to that, because coming out and being critical is really brave. They can face some real life material consequences [to saying] ‘Hey, this isn’t the type of military service I signed up for.” As with any infraction, breaking the military’s social media code of conduct can result in disciplinary action.

TikTok is a kind of confessional booth: the horizontal format feels intimate, and the algorithm prioritizes personal clips. Military members may feel more comfortable in that format than they did in, say, the heydays of Facebook or Twitter (now X).

“TikTok is a disclosure space. It’s inspiring a new expression among military personnel that’s maybe more human,” Silvestri said. “I suspect the military is not going to like that very much at all, because from the moment someone enlists, they’re dehumanized and supposed to follow orders.”

It seems no one is immune to the call of a TikTok dance. In a video posted in early March, three service members goofily dance outside a US base. “America don’t worry we’re coming to save the day,” the caption reads. The top comment, liked more than 79,000 times and speaking for a more pessimistic public, read: “Even if it’s a dance battle we are cooked.”