Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is ramping up his war on women in the military.
The Pentagon is launching a six-month review of the “effectiveness” of women serving in ground combat roles, setting the stage to potentially exclude female soldiers and Marines from combat down the line.
NPR reported Tuesday on a memo distributed by Defense Department Undersecretary for Personnel Anthony Tata, who described the assessment as a review of the “operational effectiveness of ground combat units 10 years after the Department lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles.”
According to NPR:
Tata requested Army and Marine leaders to provide data on the readiness, training, performance, casualties and command climate of ground combat units and personnel. The services are to provide points of contact no later than Jan. 15 to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit corporation that assists the government on national security issues. The memo says the data should include “all available metrics describing that individual’s readiness and ability to deploy (including physical, medical, and other measures of ability to deploy.)”
MS NOW has not independently confirmed the contents of the memo. But Kingsley Wilson, the right-wing influencer hired as the Defense Department’s press secretary last year, reportedly told NPR the review will “ensure standards are met and the United States maintains the most lethal military.”
Wilson, who has a checkered history peddling bigoted tropes and conspiracies, went on to say the Defense Department “will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda.”
That, however, sounds like a right-wing spin to describe a nonexistent problem. Multiple experts told NPR the move seems like a clear effort to provide a pretext for discriminating against women. And simply put, there’s no credible evidence suggesting the U.S. military has been endangered in any way by lifting restrictions on women serving in combat roles, as it did in 2015.
People pushing this rhetoric often point to a 2015 study from the U.S. Marine Corps — certainly no bastion of gender progressivism — which suggested all-male combat teams might perform better than mixed-gender teams. That study, however, faced staunch criticism even then over its alleged flaws — as well as the Marine Corps’ choice to omit some of the study’s findings from its publicly released summary. The Associated Press reported the Marine Corps’ commandant at the time was “the only service chief to recommend that some front-line combat jobs stay male-only.”
Nonetheless, the latest NPR report suggests Hegseth’s grand vision for a hypermasculine military is coming into view.
Before being nominated as defense secretary, Hegseth espoused avowedly sexist rhetoric around women serving in combat roles, saying things such as “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men” and this one: “We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”
During his confirmation process, Hegseth walked back his publicly stated views a bit and said he would support a “review” of the military’s standards. But he’s taken steps to undermine women enlisting in the military and to seemingly erase the history of women’s military accomplishments.
And last year, he announced changes to the military’s fitness requirements that he openly warned could keep women out of the armed services.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.