Democrats at Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing Tuesday repeatedly said that President Joe Biden’s Department of Defense (DOD) did not lower standards for women in the military, despite a long record of examples that it did.
Multiple Democratic senators, such as Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, said numerous times during the hearing that there were no lessened standards for women in the military. They denied that “quotas” existed based on gender, but multiple reports contradict these claims. Hegseth has made statements in the past against women serving in combat roles, but he recently changed his stance in the wake of his nomination.
“Women will have access to ground combat roles given the standards remain high,” Hegseth said during the hearing. “We’ll have a review to make sure standards have not been eroded in any of these cases.”
The U.S. Army decided to make different standards for men and women in the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) in 2022 after a RAND corporation study said women failed the test at much higher rates than men. From October 2020 to April 2021, before the changes, 44% of women failed the ACFT test while only 7% of men failed, according to Military.com.
At one point in 2021, 65% of women were failing the ACFT test, which prompted the change in standards.
“Removing high standards and offering substitutions like the plank pose will increase pass rates among women, leading the Army to falsely conclude that it has achieved gender equality,” Shaina N. Coss, female Army Ranger Captain and one of the first 10 women to graduate from Ranger school, wrote in an op-ed for Military.com in 2021 in response to suggestions of reducing requirements for women.
In Army Ranger school, female candidates were given more chances to pass tests during the so-called “RAP week,” the first five days of ranger school, than their male counterparts, according to multiple Army Rangers’ testimonies. Ranger instructors also voiced their concerns about standards being watered down for women.
Hegseth said the standards are meant to “maximize efficacy” at any position in the military, and they are not meant to exclude on the basis of sex.
Racial quotas and diversity policies were also a topic of discussion in the hearing.
Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation in September 2024 include a slideshow where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps officer’s applicant program, in 2022.
Additionally, Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown faced criticism for allegedly selecting individuals for certain roles and promotions based on their race to build purposefully diverse organizations. Air Force diversity policies, with Brown at the helm, appeared to prioritize bringing on non-white officers and recruits.
“The American people are rightly concerned that, at a time when our country is facing dangerous and increasing threats throughout the world, the Air Force is focused on recruitment efforts based on arbitrary racial diversity goals — not merit or increasing the force’s lethality,” James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center To Advance Security In America, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Critics of DEI in the military assert that the initiatives end up hurting recruitment numbers. While recruitment has risen by 12.5% in 2024, the Pentagon continues to struggle with a “challenging and disinterested recruiting market,” especially among young people, according to the DOD.
Republicans and Trump allies, despite a brutal grilling from Democrats, were confident in how Hegseth fared in the hearing, sources told CNN Tuesday.
“Pete Hegseth is an unconventional pick, just like Donald Trump was an unconventional candidate when he walked down those escalator steps in 2015,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker said in a statement provided to the DCNF. “We need rapid change at scale in our Department of Defense, and Pete Hegseth has the determination and the tools to achieve real change. He will inject a new warrior ethos into the Pentagon, a spirit that can cascade from the top down.”
The Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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