WILL THIBEAU: Hegseth Pentagon Finally Asks Hard Questions About Women In Combat

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is willing to do what it takes to reform the Pentagon into an organization capable of waging the campaigns necessary to defend America and protect her interests. This willingness even extends to questioning maxims of the establishment agenda like the false notion that all military units should be bastions of equal opportunity for men and women.

The deliberate exercise of ground combat is a profession meant for men. Hegseth recently commissioned a long-overdue study to, for the first time, investigate the effects of policies that removed the all-male nature of certain military units in what could be a genuine attempt to restore lethality and standards to the center of warfighting.

For too long, efforts to justify artificially mandated inclusivity in combat units were pervasive throughout the bipartisan military establishment.  Studies from 1996 to 2017 consistently showed that sex-integrated units underperformed compared to sex-segregated ones. Yet when the Obama administration opened all combat roles to women overnight, neither party required any follow-on research to measure the effects. Hegseth is finally wrenching the heads of policymakers, defense officials, and uniformed officers out of the sand by bringing such important evidence to light.

Objectivity is worth pursuing, but the outcome is not a mystery. Basic biology tells us that most women cannot meet male physical standards for combat. The Pentagon knows this too, which is why it already requires female candidates to meet those standards to qualify. The department has quietly conceded the point for years. Hegseth’s study will merely put it on the record.

The data already exists. In 2015, the Marine Corps observed 400 volunteers in combat exercises, 25% of them women. Sex-integrated teams consistently underperformed. The top quartile of women overlapped with the bottom quartile of men in anaerobic capacity. Women completed tasks more slowly, shot less accurately, and sustained injuries at more than double the rate of men (40.5% vs 18.8%). These findings do not stand alone; studies from the NIH, the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine all confirm that biological differences in strength, muscular development, and bone density produce both lower performance and higher injury rates. In combat, slower means dead. Every additional casualty burdens the squad. Researchers have already measured this disparity. The question is whether policymakers will act on it.

Study after study can serve to confirm what we already know exists; biological and social differences create an intractable reality that men and women are not meant to share every space, especially not those of U.S. military combat units. The data confirms what common sense already knows. But as my wife Michelle, a West Point graduate and Army veteran who served on a Cultural Support Team embedded with elite combat units, has argued in The American Mind, the case against women in combat does not rest on physical metrics alone.

Many conservatives fall into the trap of framing this as a question of meritocracy: let anyone serve who can meet the standards. This argument sounds reasonable but collapses under scrutiny. The Army itself undermines the meritocratic premise with separate fitness standards for men and women. To earn a top score on the Army Combat Fitness Test, a man must complete 84 push-ups in two minutes; a woman, 42. If the standards were truly equal, the debate would already be over. The separate standards exist because the Pentagon knows what it refuses to say: biology is not a social construct, and war does not grade on a curve.

The deeper question is what kind of society sends its daughters to die in wars while pretending this represents progress. The feminist project has reframed combat as just another arena for credentialing, another glass ceiling to shatter. But combat is not a career opportunity. It is organized violence. The burden of that violence has always fallen to men, not because women lack courage, but because civilizations that sacrifice their mothers on the battlefield do not, and should not, survive. Hegseth’s study may finally force Washington to confront what every infantryman already knows. The only question is whether policymakers have the courage to act on the findings.

Hegseth’s study will not reveal anything the infantryman does not already know, or anything the data has not already shown. What it will do is force a choice. Washington can continue to treat the military as a vehicle for social progress, promoting policies that make senators feel virtuous while young men die carrying weight that their female squadmates cannot. Or it can remember that the purpose of a military is to win wars, and that victory demands we send our most capable, not our most representative. The feminist vision of equality demands that women have the right to die in combat. A sane society would ask why we are so eager to let them. Anyone can open a door. Only those with courage can close one. Hegseth has done his part. Now we will see if anyone in Washington has the nerve to walk through it.

Will Thibeau is Director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He is a veteran of the U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, where he served as an Infantry Officer.

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.

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