Pentagon leaders are directing a review of the “effectiveness” of women in combat arms jobs — a move that comes nearly a decade after women got the right to serve in these roles.
Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson told Task & Purpose in a statement that the Institute for Defense Analyses is reviewing the “effectiveness” of women in ground combat roles. The Pentagon memo, originally reported by NPR and confirmed by Task & Purpose, calls for the Army and Marine Corps to submit data on ground combat troops’ readiness, training, casualties and deployability.
“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. Under Secretary Hegseth, the Department of War will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda — this is common sense,” Kingsley said.
Per Wilson’s comments, the review will be conducted by the Institute of Defense Analyses, a nonprofit that does research and analysis for the Defense Department.
In 2015, Department of Defense officials lifted the ban on women in combat jobs after years of women asking to serve in those positions. The Pentagon is now looking to assess what that “effectiveness” has looked like over the last 10 years.
The issue has been a point of contention looming over the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a combat veteran with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, who came out with strong opinions on women in combat before he took the helm of the Pentagon. In his book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” Hegseth said the integration of women into combat roles is “modern confusion about the goals of war,” and a progressive political effort “to be chivalrous and inclusive.”
His book further questions the historic role of women in combat.
“Unlike the mythologies of great Amazonian warriors in the Greek mythologies, most of the world’s accounts of women at war were connected to seductive and sexual power,” he wrote.
Then in November 2024, Hegseth said on the Shawn Ryan podcast that the U.S. “should not have women in combat roles,” and that it “hasn’t made us more lethal.” Two months later, at his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth appeared to lessen his stance to instead be that women should serve in combat jobs if they can meet the same standards as men.
According to NPR, approximately 3,800 women serve in the Army’s infantry, armor and artillery fields, and roughly 700 women serve in ground combat jobs in the Marine Corps.
In March, Hegseth directed the services to develop “sex-neutral” physical standards for troops serving in combat arms. The movement has also filtered down to annual physical fitness exams with the Army’s newest test marketed as “sex neutral,” with women and men in combat jobs needing to hit the same run-time or weight targets to pass.
