U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Angela Scolari, front, a combat marksmanship coach, fires a rifle during an all-female marksmanship subject matter expert exchange between U.S. Marines and Jordanian soldiers in Al-Quwayrah, Jordan, Oct. 29, 2024. (Angela Wilcox/U.S. Marine Corps)
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is conducting a six-month review of women serving in combat positions.
“Our standards for combat arms positions will 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,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement. “Under [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, the Department of War will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda — this is common sense.”
The Department of War is the secondary name for the Defense Department after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September.
Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, wrote in a memorandum last month that the effort is to determine the “operational effectiveness of ground combat units 10 years after the Department lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles.”
Tata requested that the Army and Marine Corps leaders 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 review was first reported by NPR.
Congress received the memo Tuesday, said an official, who was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“Contrary to the misguided beliefs of this administration, women have always made our military stronger and are more qualified to serve in their roles than Pete Hegseth is to serve as Secretary of Defense,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a combat veteran who served in that state’s Army National Guard, said in a statement. “This shadowy review effort from [the Defense Department] is clearly intended to shrink the number of women who bravely serve in combat roles, which would be devastating to our military readiness. There is no U.S. military as we know it without the incredible women who have earned their places in their units.”
Hegseth, a 45-year-old Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News TV host, drew fierce criticism leading up to his confirmation hearing for saying women have a place in the military but not in ground-based combat positions in special operations, artillery, infantry and armor units.
“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he argued on a podcast in November 2024. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”
Before senators in January, Hegseth denied he ever disparaged women and said his concern was with what he believes are slipping standards and gender quotas. He said he would conduct a review of the requirements for combat positions if confirmed.
“In ways direct and indirect, overt and subtle, standards have been changed inside infantry training units, [Army] Ranger school, infantry battalions to ensure that commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female officers or female enlisted,” Hegseth said during his confirmation.
Today, thousands of women serve in Army infantry, armor and artillery jobs, hundreds are in combat roles in the Marines and dozens are in special operations positions across the military.
Kris Fuhr, a West Point graduate who worked on gender integration for the Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., said the Army gathered data from 2019 to 2023 found “no evidence of any degradation to unit readiness or effectiveness due to the presence of women.”
“The reviews have been done. This is a search for a problem that does not exist,” Fuhr said in a statement.
Women fighting on the battlefield can be traced to the Revolutionary War, when Margaret Corbin fired a cannon to defend Fort Washington against invading British troops and became the first woman to receive a pension from Congress due to injury. But for much of U.S. military history, women were confined to clerical and medical roles.
That began to change with the more prominent participation of women in the Gulf War, which prompted Congress in the early 1990s to repeal a 1948 statute that had excluded women from positions that could be exposed to combat. By 1993, women gained the right to fly in combat aircraft and serve on combat ships.
More than 20 years later, amid the U.S. war in Afghanistan, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the full integration of women into the armed forces, without exceptions. The 2015 decision, resisted most by the Marine Corps, opened about 230,000 combat positions that were previously off limits for women.
The military has long had what is largely a two-part system for physical fitness standards — routine annual fitness based on gender and age or more grueling standards for specific combat, special operations, infantry, armor, pararescue jumpers and other jobs. For some combat roles, the standards are the same for various occupations regardless of age or gender.
Since leading the Pentagon, Hegseth has sought to make “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness. During his address before top military brass at Quantico in September, Hegseth said it is not about preventing women from serving.
“But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” the secretary said. “If women can make it, excellent, if not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result.”
