Even before his tenure as the Pentagon’s top civilian, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks about the service of female soldiers sparked concerns among many of them about their future. His speech to America’s top commanders on Tuesday fueled them, as he emphasized that all U.S. forces should be held to the “highest male standards.”
“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape, or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” he said. Women have been officially serving in military combat jobs for almost a decade.
After the speech, a general who was in the audience and requested anonymity to speak frankly, said she was struck by the professional stoicism of her roughly 800 fellow flag officers. Many had traveled through the night after being summoned by the defense secretary to attend in person and in dress uniform.
Why We Wrote This
High-ranking women say they are watching the gains they spent their careers building being erased. Despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech on Tuesday, they are determined to keep serving their country.
But as she and her staff waited at the airport for their flight back to their home base, she said she worries that Mr. Hegseth is “creating policies that will help usher women and other minorities out of the military.”
It’s a concern shared by many high-ranking military men and women as they watch the gains they spent their careers building being erased, and as they mourn the losses within the ranks of the younger women they had hoped to mentor.
“They’re so smart. They’re so innovative. They’re so bold,” the general says. And many are determined, she adds, to keep going.
“If I leave and other women leave,” the general says, “then what is left?”
“They performed magnificently”
Prior to becoming defense secretary, Mr. Hegseth made no secret of his skepticism about women’s military service. “I’m straight up just saying we shouldn’t have women in combat roles,” he said last year on a podcast. “Over human history, men in those positions are more capable.”
On Tuesday, he decried leaders who were promoted “based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts” that had made the U.S. military “less capable and less lethal.”
Shortly after being confirmed as secretary by a 51-50 vote, Mr. Hegseth fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female officer to rise to the Navy’s top job as chief of naval operations, as well as Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first Black officer to lead a branch of the U.S. armed forces.
Less than 24 hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump terminated Adm. Linda Fagan, who as commandant of the Coast Guard had become the first woman to lead a branch of the armed forces. “Now, those of us who are left, we don’t have role models to look up to,” says the general.
By April, official records of some of the first women and Black troops to serve in the military were removed – in some cases temporarily – from Pentagon websites.
Mr. Hegseth has “done everything he can to erase the stories of minorities, including women – to erase their accomplishments, to fire them, to just get rid of them,” says retired Col. Ellen Haring, who was in one of the first classes of women to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy and is now a senior research fellow at Women in International Security.
The secretary has chosen 1990 as a benchmark year for physical standards. Have standards changed “due to a softening, weakening, or gender-based pursuit of other priorities?” he wondered aloud on Tuesday. “1990 seems as good a place to start as any.”
The choice of the year was no mistake, critics say. It was in 1991 that Congress first began to repeal the laws banning women from serving in combat aviation. By 2013, lawmakers had repealed laws barring women from combat, and in 2016, following three years of study, all front-line jobs were officially opened to women.
In the meantime, some 300,000 female troops have been deployed to America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere since 2001. During that same time, some 1,200 have been injured or killed in combat.
Retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli was tapped to command U.S. combat operations in Iraq in 2006 and served as the Army’s vice chief of staff from 2008 to 2012.
He was also name-checked in the defense secretary’s speech as the kind of officer that the Trump administration no longer wants to serve. “Out with the Chiarellis, the McKenzies and the Milleys,” Mr. Hegseth said, referring to four-star generals Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who led U.S. Central Command, and Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom served in Mr. Trump’s first term.
General Chiarelli, who retired from the Army in 2012, recalls that early in his time in Iraq there was still pressure coming from Congress to limit the role of women in combat.
“That created a huge problem for me,” he told the Monitor Wednesday. The U.S. was fighting an Iraqi insurgency and needed medics, many of whom were women, to be assigned to more dangerous positions.
“I encouraged our commanders to go ahead and do it, to put women in those positions,” he says. “They performed magnificently.”
Religious undertones?
There has been concern among some some military officials about the religious undertones that they see accompanying Mr. Hegseth’s reservations.
In August, Mr. Hegseth reposted on his X account a CNN segment that featured a pastor, Doug Wilson, who is often described as a Christian nationalist.
In the CNN report, Mr. Wilson said he doesn’t believe women should hold leadership positions in the military.
A statement from a Pentagon spokesperson following Mr. Hegseth’s X posting said the defense secretary “is a proud member of a church affiliated with” Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which Mr. Wilson co-founded, and “very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.”
Patrick A. Albright/U.S. Army/AP
Since Mr. Hegseth became defense secretary, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received a “tsunami” of calls, says Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force officer and lawyer, and the group’s founder.
Complaints about sexism in the military are also about three times higher than they were last year, he says.
A former Army chaplain who spoke on background said “there had been progress” as the Pentagon took on misogyny and military sexual assaults in the years since women have served on the front lines. But in the Trump administration, men appear to be freer to say and do what they like, the former chaplain added.
He now serves as what’s known as an Ecclesiastical Endorser, a federally vetted liaison between churches and the Department of Defense. Many of the chaplains he is responsible for are women who are feeling “scared, and they’re discriminated against,” he says. “Women are leaving prematurely from a career or choosing not to pursue it at all.”
Cecilia Bradford, a chaplain in the Army Reserve, says she has come “face to face” with fellow chaplains “who didn’t believe women should be in ministry.”
But she is also driven by the conviction that she can make a difference. Now, she says, she wants “to make sure that we continue on.” The field has been male-dominated “for so long,” she adds, “that if we don’t leave our imprint, it could very well go back to that.”
That’s a concern shared by the general who was in the audience for Mr. Hegseth’s speech. “We’ve worked very, very hard” to attract and keep women in the military, she says. The Trump administration is “actively working against what I have worked for, and it blows my mind.”
Mr. Hegseth, during his speech, touted the work his department has done in past months “to remove the social justice … garbage that has infected” the military. “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions,” he said.
At the same time, he endeavored, it seemed, to offer some reassurance, stressing that both racism and sexual harassment “are wrong and illegal.” Infractions, he added, “will be ruthlessly enforced.”
He also said that America’s female troops “are the absolute best in the world” and that defense officials “very much value [their] impact.”
As far as combat jobs go, “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If it means that no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” he added this week. “This is not the intent, but it could be the result.”
There will be women who qualify among the many who have already surpassed gender-neutral standards, says Dr. Haring, pointing to the 170 women who currently serve as Rangers, an elite branch of Army Special Operations Forces.
“What [Mr. Hegseth] doesn’t recognize or acknowledge,” she adds, “is that once you finally let women compete, many, many, many women have successfully done all the things he thinks women can’t do.”
Staff writer Anna Mulrine Grobe reported from Brussels.
