VANESSA BATTAGLIA: Hegseth Is Restoring Meritocracy At The Defense Department

Defense Secretary Hegseth’s “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” Task Force will soon be completing a final audit of several military bases for compliance with Hegseth’s January 29^th directive about restoring meritocracy in the DoD. The task – though enormous, and even if fulfilled – still falls short of Hegseth’s vision.

The Task Force will be checking for several measures, including the separation of trans individuals from service; discontinuation of military-funded trans interventions; pronouns and grooming standards according to biological sex only; returning to in-person working; returning the re-named Fort Liberty to its original name Fort Bragg; cancelling all programs/jobs/trainings that promote gender ideology; no more men in women’s bathrooms/locker rooms/dorms; no more “pronouns in bio”; discontinuation of “cultural observance” activities. A near-total cleaning-out of divisive ideological agendas on military bases and restoration to earlier sanity.

Secretary Hegseth is doing significant heavy-lifting on his own, cancelling DEI contracts and sending strong anti-DEI messaging — driving services to publicly recant on earlier sins. His common-sense, return-to-lethality ideological tidal wave inspired the New York Times to bash DEI back in January. Even the Times agrees that women cannot fulfill combat roles effectively.

Hegseth’s DoD fired the cultural observance cake-cutting lady Rear Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, who’d refused to hang portraits of our POTUS and SecDef and said she’d “wait it out.” This is the accountability people need to see to ensure that divisive ideologies are being driven out.

Most notably, Secretary Hegseth recently announced a single fitness standard for combat roles to correct Obama’s decision to allow women into combat roles with sex-specific (lower) fitness standards. Every job in the military should have a single fitness standard, just as they have single aptitude standards. This is meritocracy.

But there’s a wrinkle: Hegseth originally wanted women out of combat, which was the rule from 1775 until 2013. With good reason, because women can’t run across a battlefield carrying an average sized man with gear on. And women could become pregnant at any given time.

Right on schedule amidst the push for meritocracy, the Air Force announced that it doesn’t want female pilots flying even during early pregnancy. Normal people would agree that expectant mothers do not need to be operating fighter jets or re-fueling tankers. But what is it to pay a pilot who randomly can’t fly for a year at a time? Per President Trump’s January 27^th Executive Order on Restoring America’s Fighting Force, this is “providing special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, sex, color, or ethnicity.”

For the intent of President Trump’s Executive Order to be fully carried out, no such sex-specific benefits can continue to exist. We have a single fitness standard for all, except for when females could be 100% unfit to do their job, which could happen any time, for a full year? In which case they’re just exempt from the standards?

Which goes back to Secretary Hegseth’s remarks about women in combat. Allowing women to remain in combat roles as long as they pass a male-oriented fitness test goes against the combat-informed gut instinct that emboldened Hegseth to make his remarks back in 2024 and earlier. No battery of fitness tests can isolate or anticipate all potential female frailties in the unique environment of combat.

Under the header of “returning the DoD to meritocracy,” there is plenty of work to do. Hegseth’s Task Force will determine whether the services finished the hearty servings of vegetables they signed up for. But Hegseth’s vision for a lethal fighting force soars beyond the more practical limitations of the “DEI is dead” guidance. This can only have been round one. Stay true to thyself, Secretary Hegseth.

Vanessa Battaglia is a defense engineer with 14 years’ experience designing software, hardware, and airborne systems for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Special Operations Command, and the Federal Aviation Administration. She spent most of her time in the defense world at Raytheon, and lately writes for The Federalist and Human Events as well.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.