Should women serve in combat? Military experts weigh in
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, is facing a firestorm of backlash for voicing his belief that women should not serve in military combat roles. Although the media is largely united against him, opinions among combat and military experts are more split.
Will Thibeau, a former Army Ranger with multiple combat deployments, told Fox News Digital that he agrees with Hegseth wholeheartedly.
"I think soon-to-be Secretary Hegseth stated simple truths that 12 years ago were commonly understood and affirmed by the senior-most leaders in the Pentagon, the rank and file of the military and the culture at large, that war and in particular units that are made and forged to fight in war with no other purpose are units meant for men and men only," he said.
"Biological sex and relationships between men and women is a reality that you can't avoid," he added. "And when you induce stress, physical uncertainty, physical proximity and unique scenarios to that biological reality, you get a fracture of what would have been a typical military team, or a military unit forged for warfighting."
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Hegseth, 44, is a former Fox News host and Army infantry officer who served two combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and an additional deployment to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Trump tapped Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, one of the most influential positions in his cabinet, on Nov. 13, just over a week after he won the election. The president-elect said of Hegseth that "nobody fights harder for the Troops" and "with Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice."
However, Hegseth is facing a great deal of pushback from Democrats and the media, most especially for his comments on a Nov. 7 episode of the "Shawn Ryan Show" podcast in which he said, "I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles."
Hegseth asserted that women serving in combat roles "hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal" and "has made fighting more complicated."
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He did not argue against women serving in the military or even in non-ground combat roles such as in the Air Force. Rather, he made the point that the U.S. military has been lowering its physical standards to allow more women to be eligible to serve in combat roles, something that he said increases the risk of combat complications and fatalities.
He said, "I love women service members who contribute amazingly," but asserted that "everything about women serving together makes the situation more complicated and complication in combat means casualties are worse."
He also criticized the upper echelons of military leadership for changing standards and prioritizing filling diversity quotas above combat effectiveness. He pointed to a 2015 study by the Marine Corps that found that integrated male-female units did "drastically worse" in terms of combat effectiveness than all-male units.
"Between bone density and lung capacity and muscle strength, men and women are just different," he said. "So, I’m ok with if you maintain the standards just where they are for everybody, and if there’s some, you know, hard-charging female that meets that standard, great, cool, join the infantry battalion. But that is not what’s happened. What has happened is the standards have lowered."
Hegseth noted that he was not necessarily advocating for making the change right now, commenting; "Imagine the demagoguery in Washington, D.C., if you were actually making the case for, you know, ‘We should scale back women in combat.’"
"As the disclaimer for everybody out there," he added, "we’ve all served with women and they’re great, it’s just our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where … over human history, men are more capable."
Despite this, Ellen Haring, a retired Army colonel, told Fox News Digital that many women and men in the military are concerned about Hegseth becoming secretary and instituting these changes.
"Women who are in these combat jobs and many of them have been there for six, eight years now, are very energized and concerned about the idea that they might lose their jobs," she said.
According to Haring, there are 2,500 women currently serving in ground combat roles in Army infantry, armor, field artillery branches as well as special forces. She also said that 152 women have earned Army Ranger tabs and there are currently ten women in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment.
She said that despite women making up only a quarter of all West Point Academy graduates they accounted for a third of all lieutenants slotted to armor combat units.
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"There's no indication that any of those units have been harmed by their presence," she said. "So, Hegseth claims that adding women to these units is going to create a degree of complication and is somehow or another puts people at risk. That hasn't happened at any unit that we've seen so far. So, I don't know where he's coming up with these notions."
Beyond not harming units, Haring went on to say that women have helped to improve the professionalism of units, especially infantry units.
"Infantry units had a culture of hazing and kind of abuse of each other," she said. "Their presence there has turned a spotlight on that kind of behavior and has actually eliminated a lot of it across the force. So, this kind of brutal behavior that infantry units engaged in amongst themselves is slowly being eradicated by the women's presence."
Similarly, Captain Micah Ables, an Army Infantry company commander, told Fox News Digital that women in his unit have improved the "team player" attitude of the company as well as broadened its capabilities when deployed.
Ables’ first deployment to Afghanistan was with an all-male unit, however, he later deployed with one of the first integrated companies in the infantry. He said that though there was some initial pushback and tension, the female soldiers in his unit quickly proved themselves as capable and the company adapted without too much issue.
He said that many of the women in his unit have proved to be some of the most physically and tactically capable leaders and soldiers under his command.
"Once I did take over the mixed-gender company, I didn't really know what to expect," he said. "But they dug in, and they did what they needed to do to be experts."
On the other hand, Jessie Jane Duff, a retired female gunnery sergeant in the Marines, told Fox News Digital that allowing women to fill combat roles is a "lethal mistake."
She also cited the study by the Marines that she said found that integrated units were only 60 percent as effective as all-male units and women were between 20 and 30 percent more prone to injury.
"From a biological level. We're not equal," she said. "With the lack of testosterone, women take a longer time to recover and rebuild muscle because they lack that testosterone. Whereas men who also get severely injured based upon the training have a higher rate of being able to come back into the combat unit and perform."
"Why would you water down the effectiveness of our infantry units? You're watering it down because you're trying to reach a goal of equality," she went on. "You can have the opportunity to pass, but you should not be accommodated because of your gender when a more qualified man could take that slot."
Finally, Anna Simons, a retired professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, told Fox News Digital that it comes down to diversity versus similarity.
"Women have been in combat from the beginning of time," she said. "They've defended their children, they've defended their property, they've defended husbands, they’ve fought valiantly, that's absolutely true. But the issue isn't women in combat. The issue is women in combat units, small groups of individuals where everybody needs to be essentially interchangeable and equally proficient at certain combat skills."
"The whole point of combat is to wield violence and to be able to absorb violence," she said. "So there has to be a sameness or similarity to people so that they become easily interchangeable when it comes to fundamental skills, shoot, move and communicate skills."
"Everybody needs a baseline of that, and you want the baseline to be as high as possible," she concluded. "That means that people need to be less similar rather than more diverse in their capabilities."