Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made headlines when he summoned hundreds of senior military leaders to a military base in Quantico, Virginia and made troubling comments about equity in the military. President Donald Trump’s address to the generals was also alarming, calling for troops to be deployed in U.S. cities as “training grounds” and to fight the “enemy within.” The ACLU has denounced such deployments as an unlawful abuse of power.
Hegseth’s remarks focused on stated plans to weaken servicemembers’ ability to lodge complaints about assault, bias, harassment, and other wrongdoing. He also spoke of a new policy prohibiting beards, despite federal courts upholding servicemembers’ right to wear facial hair for religious reasons, and the medical fact that many Black men need to forgo shaving because they are predisposed to develop a painful skin condition.
Among Hegseth’s pronouncements was that “each service will ensure that every requirement for every combat [military occupational specialty], for every designated combat arms position, returns to the highest male standard only, because this job is life or death, standards must be met, and not just met — at every level, we should seek to exceed the standard, to push the envelope, to compete.” Hegseth added, “If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is.”
Hegseth’s directive has puzzled military observers, because all combat occupational specialties already impose gender-neutral physical requirements. That has been the case since the early 1990s, when some branches—notably the Navy—first began accepting women into certain combat roles. That means that the thousands of women now serving in artillery, infantry, armor, and combat engineer jobs, and the women who have entered special operations forces like Army Rangers and Green Berets—comprising 12 percent of those troops—are meeting the same standards as their male colleagues. Hegseth appeared to be conflating the rigorous, occupation-specific neutral standards with the overall branch-specific physical fitness tests that all servicemembers also must pass, which are less demanding and gender-normed.
Regardless of whether Hegseth’s misrepresentation of the current physical demands on women in combat was intentional or the product of ignorance, his purpose is unmistakable: smear women as unqualified while imposing physical fitness standards that he believes they cannot meet.
Hegseth has made no secret of his belief that women don’t belong in combat, though he walked back that message during his confirmation hearings. But his actions as defense secretary betray hostility to all servicewomen. He spent his first months in office firing numerous senior women leaders—purges that have been matched by his dismissals of Black senior officers and other leaders of color—and axing the Women, Peace and Security Program initiated during President Donald Trump’s first term.
The week before Hegseth’s Quantico appearance, his campaign to erase women in the military took an especially conspicuous, and troubling, turn when he eliminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. DACOWITS has been providing guidance to the secretary of defense for more than 70 years. Created in 1951 by then-Secretary of Defense General George Marshall, DACOWITS initially was charged with helping boost women’s military recruitment following the 1948 enactment of Women’s Armed Services Integration Act. Although women had been serving in the military since the Revolutionary War, the statute allowed women to be permanent members of all service branches’ peacetime forces (albeit with caps on their numbers and restrictions on their ability to serve in combat).
In a statement defending DACOWITS’s elimination, a Pentagon spokesperson characterized the committee as furthering a “divisive feminist agenda that hurts combat readiness.” Not surprisingly, such rhetoric is belied by DACOWITS’s actual record. A non-partisan group composed of men and women, DACOWITS developed its recommendations by conducting annual visits to military installations and interviewing servicemembers of all genders. As women’s participation in the military has grown—women make up roughly 18 percent of all servicemembers—the issues on which DACOWITS provided guidance also multiplied. The committee has consulted on everything from women’s training opportunities and career advancement, to their need for family support like parental leave and childcare, to their distinct health care concerns like pregnancy. Workplace abuse, sexual harassment, and assault also have been a consistent concern.
As women began serving in combat roles—all restrictions on which were lifted in 2015, after the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and ACLU of Northern California filed a lawsuit a lawsuit challenging them—DACOWITS has made recommendations to facilitate women’s integration, such as securing properly-fitting body armor, boots, and uniforms, proposing strategies for addressing gender bias, and, yes, assuring that women can meet applicable physical fitness standards.
Over the course of its history, spanning Republican as well as Democratic administrations, DACOWITS has made more than 1,000 recommendations to the Department of Defense. Ninety-eight percent of these efforts have been implemented in full or in part.
Given that women in combat jobs already must satisfy stringent gender-neutral physical requirements, Hegseth’s muddled new directive about fitness standards likely won’t dramatically reduce women’s numbers in those roles. Eliminating DACOWITS, however, does deliberate, incalculable harm to all servicewomen’s ability to thrive in their careers, and does risk driving women out of the military—as well as deterring others from enlisting altogether.
For a secretary of defense fixated on promoting the “lethality” of U.S. forces, scrapping a venerable advisory body relied upon by the Pentagon for decades to maximize our troops’ readiness does nothing to promote our national security—and everything to advance Hegseth’s personal extreme views about women’s right to serve their country.
Published October 8, 2025 at 10:19PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/m2CEp4l
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