Will Pete Hegseth’s ‘War on Woke’ Sideline Women?
Donald Trump’s Pentagon chief moderated his stance to get the job but is now pushing for change in the name of high standards.
By Missy Ryan
In
12 and a half minutes or less, you must: Run half a mile; scramble up a
six-foot wall; lift 16 sandbags, each one roughly the weight of a
6-year-old child; drag a stretcher 100 meters; complete a farmer’s carry
with a pair of 40-pound water cans; then run another half mile. Quickly
take a breath. Then run four eight-minute miles and finish off with six
chin-ups. That’s just day one at Ranger School, the arduous 62-day Army
leadership course that washes out half of those who try.
Since
the military opened ground-combat units to women, in 2016, 160 have
earned their Ranger tabs. And in the vision that Pete Hegseth laid out
days before being tapped as defense secretary last year, none of them
belong on the front lines.
“I’m
straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” the
Fox News host told a podcaster in November. “It hasn’t made us more
effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more
complicated.”
But
to win confirmation as America’s 29th defense secretary, Hegseth needed
votes from senators, one of whom, in particular, was a woman who had
served in combat. Republican Senator Joni Ernst, who commanded troops in
Iraq and Kuwait, remained a holdout. With his future riding on her
vote, the nominee suggested under oath that his views had evolved. It
wasn’t that he was against women in combat, per se. It was just that he
wanted to uphold military excellence.
“Yes,
women will have access to ground-combat roles, given the standards
remain high,” Hegseth assured the senator at his confirmation hearing.
Who could argue with high standards? Ernst voted yes and, with a
tie-breaking vote from Vice President J. D. Vance, Hegseth’s nomination
squeaked by, 51–50.
Six
months into his tenure at the Pentagon, the secretary has not announced
any plans to reverse the Obama administration’s 2013 decision to open
all combat roles to women. But he is moving ahead with an effort to
review and potentially overhaul combat and physical-fitness standards.
Some view the push as a backdoor attempt to achieve the same goal.
This
spring, Hegseth dispatched a newly created team of advisers to elite
units and military schools—including bases where Special Forces, Navy
SEALs, and Rangers are trained—looking for evidence of lowered
standards. According to internal documents I obtained, members of the
Secretary of Defense Assessment Team, which is headed by Hegseth’s
adviser Eric Geressy, conducted the visits with a goal to “review and
restore training standards” for elite units. In a previously unreported
move, the documents also indicate a plan to “conduct a new review on
Women in Combat (training/warfighting) Study.”
“We
do not have the luxury to lower the standards in order to accommodate
the lowest common denominator,” the document states. “Service members
want a challenge they do not want to be part of a loosing [sic] team and want to serve alongside the best.”
During
their visits to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School
at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia;
and the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, California, members of
Hegseth’s assessment team requested detailed information about
performance, including raw data on individual candidates.
Hegseth’s
suspicion that standards are slipping defies what military officials
have told me again and again in recent months: that although all troops
must take regular physical-fitness tests specific to their military
service, most of which are adjusted for age and gender, they must also
undergo separate, so-called occupational tests that are gender-neutral.
For combat units, those include intense physical requirements far more
strenuous than what other troops must do. An infantry soldier is going
to have to sweat more than an accountant. Those job-related standards,
the officials have told me, have not been lowered to accommodate women.
“There
are myths that have been propagated, and what he’s doing is ginning up
that myth again,” one person familiar with Hegseth’s review told me.
A
quarter of the way into the 21st century, drones and digital weapons
arguably matter more in warfare than push-ups and pull-ups. But in a
military styled after the proclivities of Donald Trump and Hegseth, any
whiff of special treatment for women or people of color must be
eradicated. And changing the physical-fitness standards might turn out
to be a means to a more ambitious end, one that could alter the
landscape for women in uniform and send a deterrent message to women
wishing to join.
“They
definitely have a solution in search of a problem,” said the person
familiar with the review who, like others, spoke with me on the
condition of anonymity. “He keeps looking for data to show that
standards have been lowered, and that women can’t hack it.”
The only trouble? The person told me that “there is no data like that.”
Women
make up roughly 20 percent of today’s military, but until recently,
their roles were sharply limited. Women were not permitted to fly in
combat aviation units until 1993 or serve on submarines until 2010.
Although thousands of women served on the front lines in support roles
in two decades of counterinsurgent warfare following 9/11, they remained
officially barred from combat until the past decade.
In
2013, Barack Obama’s second defense secretary, Leon Panetta, announced
that the ban on women serving in ground-combat roles would end in the
coming years. “Not everyone is going to be able to be a combat soldier,”
Panetta said at the time. “But everyone is entitled to a chance.”
In
late 2015, after a divisive internal review, Ashton Carter, Obama’s
fourth and final defense secretary, ordered the integration of some
200,000 ground-combat roles. Physical and other standards for those
units would remain gender-neutral, Carter cautioned, and there would be
no quotas for female participation. Of the military services, only the
Marine Corps dissented, citing a study that found that mixed-gender
Marine units did not perform as well as all-male units. (Carter and
others cited flaws with the study, and the Marines were integrated along
with the others.)
Since
then, female officers have commanded armor and artillery platoons and
moved into other ground-combat jobs. Roughly 500 female Marines
currently serve in combat roles. Still, the share of women in
ground-combat units remains tiny. Fewer than 10 women have passed the
Army Special Operations Command’s demanding “Q Course” to become Special
Forces soldiers, and no woman has become a Navy SEAL. Of the 1,400
soldiers who completed Ranger School last year, the overwhelming
majority were men.
After
his nomination, Hegseth was careful to praise women’s “indispendable
role” in the military, as he told the podcaster Megyn Kelly in December.
“The women of the Pentagon, of our military, are revered, appreciated,”
he said. “All I’ve really ever cared about is making sure the standards
are maintained.”
But
Hegseth’s problem with women in ground-combat units wasn’t just
operational; it was moral. In a book he published a few months earlier,
Hegseth devotes a chapter to what he calls “the (deadly) obsession with
women warriors.” Women can serve as pilots and support troops, and they
may sometimes find themselves in the cross fire of the modern
battlefield. But placing them in infantry or artillery units, Hegseth
argues, causes problems. It distracts male soldiers from their core
mission, forces them to compensate for female soldiers’ lesser strength
and smaller body size, and makes casualties more likely. Spineless
uniformed leaders, ceding to Democratic demands over the past decade,
have watered down combat standards to accommodate women, he writes,
leaving the military weaker. Thrusting women into jobs focused on
killing would also disrupt traditional gender norms. “Dads push us to
take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” he writes. “We
need moms. But not in the military, and especially not in combat roles.”
Hegseth
compares what he sees as the unrealistic goal of willing women’s
physical strength to match that of men’s with America’s failed attempts
to impose democracy on Afghanistan. He rails against decisions made by
the “so-called enlightened class” that would end up costing service
member lives. “They don’t care how many battles we lose as long as our
dead are diverse,” he writes.
In
the weeks after he arrived at the Pentagon in January, Hegseth moved
quickly to eliminate what he publicly derided as “woke bullshit,” in
line with an executive order that Trump issued on Inauguration Day.
Pentagon officials launched a chaotic effort to take down online content
containing references to race or gender, removing webpages featuring
the first female fighter pilot and Ranger graduate, along with others
celebrating the Tuskegee Airmen and Jackie Robinson. The Pentagon
reinstated a ban on transgender service members and suspended advisory
boards on women in the services. In February, the president abruptly
fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first-ever female chief of naval
operations, and General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, only the second Black officer to hold that job. Hegseth
had attacked both officers in his book for being excessively focused on
race or being diversity hires. Neither has commented publicly about
their firing.
Hegseth
has highlighted the progress the military has made in “reviving the
warrior ethos” and eradicating Democratic administrations’ misplaced
focus on diversity in the ranks. In Hegseth’s view, there was no racism
or sexism problem to fix, so drawing attention to those issues just
stirred up discord.
Speaking to Special Operations forces in May,
Hegseth said that troops “want to be in disciplined formations that
value them not for immutable differences, not for the color of our skin,
or gender, but because of honor and integrity and grit and patriotism.”
He added: “They want a meritocracy where they can work hard, make
themselves better, kick ass and rise up.”
For Hegseth, physical fitness is a trait of the utmost importance. As he told soldiers at the Army War College
in April, service members must be “fit, not fat; sharp, not shabby.”
Pentagon social media has emphasized his morning physical-training
sessions with the troops, doing push-ups from Warsaw to Omaha Beach. The
secretary has vowed that standards will be “high, equal, and
unwavering.”
In
March, Hegseth announced a military-wide review of combat and
physical-fitness standards, ordering Pentagon officials to develop plans
to distinguish between combat and noncombat jobs and to ensure proper
requirements for those roles, including “the ability to carry heavy
loads” and exhibiting “speed, strength, agility, and endurance.” To that
order, Hegseth added a handwritten addendum: “No existing standard will be lowered in this process.”
In a video
released shortly afterward, Hegseth strides along the corridor outside
his Pentagon office, speaking straight to the camera as he explains the
initiative as a commonsense fix to the military’s failure to enact equal
and adequate standards when it integrated women into combat roles.
Last month, in an echo of his earlier, pre-nomination statements, Hegseth posted on his personal X account a news article
about Israel’s decision to end a trial program that placed women in
combat positions, because of the difficulty they faced in meeting
physical requirements. “Worthy [sic] paying attention to,” he wrote. “Israel takes standards & testing very seriously.”
But
in those statements, Hegseth has repeatedly mischaracterized the status
quo. Notably, Hegseth has not been able to identify evidence of lowered
combat requirements in the U.S. military. Instead, the secretary and
his supporters have pointed to standards being “informally” lowered,
suggesting without evidence that women have been waved through Ranger
School or given extra chances because of mandates or pressure from
politically attuned bosses.
Spokespeople
for Naval Special Warfare, which trains Navy SEALs; for Army Special
Operations Command, which trains Special Forces soldiers; and for Fort
Benning, where Ranger School is located, all said they have
gender-neutral standards. “We ensure our data-[validated], operationally
validated, and gender-neutral standards are building the warfighter for
today and the future,” Lieutenant Colonel Allie Scott, a spokesperson
for Army Special Operations, told me. Jennifer Gunn, a spokesperson at
Fort Benning, told me that opportunities to repeat phases of the Ranger
course, known as “recycling,” are based on performance. “No demographic
or group is afforded preferential treatment,” she said.
One
retired female officer who completed Ranger School told me that many
men, like many women, who attempt to go into combat jobs are unable to
meet the standards. But some from both genders will excel. “The thing
that bothers me about the rhetoric about standards being lowered is that
no one can exactly tell you what they mean. Was it pull-ups? Was it
something else?” the female Ranger School graduate said. “It feels like a
sound bite.”
Pentagon
Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, in a statement, said that
combat-position standards would be “elite, uniform, and sex neutral,
because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn’t care if you’re
a man or a woman.”
Katherine
Kuzminski, the director of studies at the Center for a New American
Security, told me that that is already the case, at least in terms of
occupational standards. She said Hegseth’s rhetoric may resonate because
of the confusing nature of physical and occupational tests across
services and military specialties. “When you look at the broader picture
of Hegseth’s previous writings and comments, it sends a message that
somehow women aren’t meeting the mark,” Kuzminski said. “In reality, the
sex-neutral standards he lays out as his goal in the memo already exist
in combat specialities."
Hegseth’s critics suspect he knows that but has other motives in mind.
“We
need to make sure that there isn’t some sort of surreptitious effort
ongoing to try to narrow the people who are allowed to serve,”
Democratic Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, an Air Force
veteran, told me. “I think there is a kind of a lurking theory that the
only kind of warrior is a 6-foot-4-inch male Christian guy from the
South. But there is also, increasingly, a place for people who are also
able to complement that—a warrior who is a thinker, or an engineer, or a
number of other kinds of things.”
Houlahan
and others caution that, despite the recent recruiting boost that Trump
and Hegseth are touting, Americans’ propensity to serve has undergone a
long decline, now hovering around 11 percent. America’s future military
will need women to help fill the ranks.
Hegseth’s
review poses a different challenge for the Navy and the Air Force than
it does for the infantry-focused Army and Marine Corps. A fighter pilot
most certainly is in combat, but his or her job has much different
physical requirements than a Marine’s on the front lines. Serving as a
cook on a big ship isn’t normally considered a combat job, but that
sailor may be called to command the guns in the event of an attack. And
what makes sense for Space Force service members who might sit at a
computer all day operating a satellite?
The
Navy has age- and gender-normed general physical-fitness standards and
separate age- and gender-neutral fitness and occupational standards for
six elite professions, including Navy divers, rescue swimmers, and
technicians who, among other duties, neutralize underwater explosives. A
bomb-disposal tech, for example, must do, in two minutes each, a minimum of six pull-ups and at least 50 push-ups and 50 curl-ups, plus a 500-yard swim and 1.5-mile run in fewer than 21 minutes.
The Air Force has a similar system: gender- and age-adjusted physical-fitness tests for the whole force and then heightened, age- and gender-neutral physical tests
for a subset of jobs more similar to ground combat, including combat
control and pararescue. Those individuals must perform tasks including
carrying a 60-pound load three miles in under 49 minutes and deadlifting
at least 270 pounds. “We don’t care how old you are. We do not care
what sex you are,” one Air Force official said of those specialties.
“Here is the bar. If you’re going to be in this career field, you must
meet it.”
All
Marines take two different age- and gender-normed fitness tests each
year. In addition, Marines in ground-combat roles, regardless of gender,
must take an additional job-specific physical test
that is gender- and age-neutral. A Marine rifleman, male or female,
must simulate evacuating a 205-pound casualty 50 meters, for example,
and scaling a 56-inch wall, all while also carrying their 55-pound
fighting load.
The Army has had perhaps the most winding, emotionally charged physical-fitness saga.
Last
year, a Republican amendment to an annual defense bill mandated higher
standards for combat jobs. To help determine what the new minimum
standards for those jobs might be, the Army asked RAND to conduct a
study that, among other things, showed a drop-off in pass rates for
women and National Guard and Reserves soldiers when standards were
raised past a certain level. Before Joe Biden left office, Army leaders
decided to raise the standards for those combat jobs but keep them
gender-normed.
The
Army changed course after the Trump administration took over, opting
for a gender-neutral standard for 21 combat specialties. An Army
official told me that Trump’s new Army secretary, Daniel Driscoll, “was
very much, ‘Let’s have high standards and whoever meets those standards,
we’re good to go,’” the official said. But in a curious move that the
Army has struggled to explain, it kept the test age-adjusted for those
jobs, even though the argument for a sole standard had long been that
combat doesn’t care who you are—your age, identity, or gender.
Another
Army official said that the service’s leadership believed that aligning
with Hegseth’s priorities would benefit the Army. “I don’t know how
many push-ups you have to do to survive on the battlefield,” the
official told me. “But I do know that more is better.”
Many
female veterans support gender-neutral, job-related standards. “Women
should be allowed to try and fail,” the female Ranger School graduate
told me. “You should want people to go to Ranger School. If they fail,
maybe they’ll go back and retrain.”
Samantha
Weeks, a former fighter pilot who served as a member of a Pentagon
advisory board on women until it was suspended, recalled having to bench
80 percent of her body weight when she was in pilot training in the
late 1990s. It was hard, but achievable. “I think there is not a woman
out there in the military who doesn’t want the standard to be the
standard,” she told me.
But
many current and former officials also say the military needs to do a
better job in developing evidence-based physical criteria. “You just
have to make sure the requirements are rational to the role and aren’t a
vestige of a different era,” Alex Wagner, who served as the Air Force’s
assistant secretary for personnel during the Biden administration, told
me. “Pete Hegseth’s understanding of the military seems frozen in 1980s
action films. But today’s battlefield isn’t going to be Rambo hacking
his way through jungles.”
Pentagon
officials say they have been informed that Hegseth’s office is
preparing to release a new, military-wide physical-fitness test. It was
not immediately clear whether that test, should it materialize, would
replace the service tests or whether it would be gender-neutral. Any
significantly higher standard could have the greatest impact on National
Guard and Reserves troops, which typically do worse on fitness exams
than active-duty personnel.
Weeks,
the former fighter pilot, recalled being the only female pilot in her
squadron when she flew long missions over Iraq as part of Operation
Northern Watch in 2000. Unable to use the “piddle pack” that male pilots
used to relieve themselves, and unwilling to opt for “tactical
dehydration,” which could be dangerous during a 12-hour mission, she
used a DIY solution involving a neonatal face mask and a surgical tube.
In
the years since, women have expanded their presence across the force
and, along the way, earned greater recognition that they may have
different needs, but that doesn’t mean that they’re less capable of
doing the job. This year, the Air Force rolled out a new alternative for
the male piddle pack to make missions easier for female pilots.
“I
had men who told me, ‘I don’t want to talk about that. Go find a
female,’” Weeks recalled of trying to find support in her unit. “‘Well,
what female can I talk to?’ I said. ‘There are no others.’”
About the Author
Missy Ryan is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She can be reached on Signal at mryan.86.
No comments:
Post a Comment