Take It From A Female Army Vet: Pete Hegseth Is Right About Women In Combat

President-elect Donald Trump got immediate backlash when he nominated decorated U.S. Army veteran and Ivy League graduate Pete Hegseth to be his incoming Defense Secretary, with most critics harping on the fact that Hegseth also happened to be a regular cohost on Fox News.

In turn, Hegseth has gotten a fair amount of backlash for his unequivocal statement in a recent interview about the idea of female service members serving in combat roles.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” adding, “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated. We’ve all served with women and they’re great, just — our institution don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally — not traditionally, over human history — men in those positions are more capable.”

WATCH:

Pete Hegseth 5 days ago: "I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles." pic.twitter.com/0W3LDSakud

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 13, 2024

As a woman who served proudly in the U.S. Army for ten years — five years in the Army Reserve and five on active duty — I wholeheartedly agree with Hegseth here: women should not be placed in combat roles.

It’s important to understand that I’m not saying — and neither is Hegseth, as far as I can tell — that there are no women who could handle combat. I’m quite certain that some women could, just as I’m certain that there are a fair number of men who could not.

I’m also not saying that, even if they weren’t supposed to be in combat roles, some women won’t end up in combat scenarios in the chaos of war. History is replete with examples of the heroics of non-combatants, so we know that happens. That is the reason that every soldier, regardless of sex or occupational specialty, spends the first ten weeks in the Army completing Basic Combat Training (BCT). Males and females alike train on weapons like the M16-A2 rifle, hand grenades, and Claymore mines. I even got the chance during training to fire an AT-4 rocket launcher into a junkyard full of retired tanks (five stars, highly recommend).

What I am saying, however, is that putting women in combat should not be the goal, and the reason for that is simple: most can’t — and shouldn’t — handle it. And that fact is made abundantly clear by the fact that most, “G.I. Jane” notwithstanding, can’t even make it through training and meet the standards set for men in the same roles.

What Hegseth said on that point was exactly right: women in combat roles have not made the military “more effective” or “more lethal.”

When then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opened combat roles to women in 2013, I participated in a panel discussion on The Dana Loesch Radio Show (along with Air Force veteran Stacey Washington) and predicted exactly what the fallout would be when women were allowed in combat — and I said more or less exactly what Hegseth did.

“The real issue is this: do we want a military that is first and foremost a formidable fighting force or one that is first and foremost dedicated to enforced equality? We can’t have both,” I said at the time.

I went on to explain:

The military is strong in part because it is the most discriminatory workplace in the nation. You can be kept out, fired, or barred from promotion simply for being too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too sick, too injured, too stupid, and the list goes on. Every move [the military] has made in the direction of political correctness has been a move away from strength.

From the very first day that women were allowed to serve in the military, they have been held to a lower standard than the men who held the same positions. Even as far back as WWII, by regulation the bench seats in standard transport trucks were designated to hold eight men. The same regulation stated that only seven women would fit on the same bench seat, in an effort to ensure that female Marines were given enough space to remain comfortable during transport. Today’s Army physical training tests require much higher standards of men than of women – men are required to run faster and do more push ups than women who have the same MOS (military operational specialty).

“Every time a job is opened to women in the military, instead of demanding that the women meet the same standards set by the men, they create a new (nearly always lower) standard for the women,” I concluded at the time. “As more and more women qualify for jobs based on these lowered standards, the efficiency and overall performance of the unit as a whole is decreased. To add close combat jobs to that list is asking for an Army that cannot help but be weakened as the standards for such jobs are lowered in the name of ‘equality.'”

This is, across the board, exactly what happened in the years since Panetta opened the doors to women in combat roles, and Hegseth is absolutely correct that it has done nothing to increase the efficiency and lethality — the primary reasons for its existence — of our military.