What We Know About Women In Combat

Soon after being nominated to lead the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth—a former Army National Guard major and Fox News personality—found himself mired in controversy over his past statements and actions. Among the most notable? His comments about women in combat. 

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he said in a podcast interview this past November. He was surprised, he told host Shawn Ryan, that his recent book had not gotten “more blowback” over its sections about women in the military. 

The past is prologue, it seems. But Hegseth’s comments raise broader questions about women in the military. For starters, how has the role of women in the military changed in recent years?

All combat roles in the U.S. military were opened to women by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in January 2013. Two years later, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter lifted all gender-based restrictions on military service with “no exceptions.” This meant that women, who now make up almost 18 percent of U.S. military personnel, no longer faced barriers in certain occupations or to their promotion through the ranks. These seismic shifts in the organization of the U.S. military followed a multiyear campaign by servicewomen to eliminate continuing gender segregation by an employer of more than 2 million people. 

That hard-fought campaign drew on women’s battle-field experiences in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars where women distinguished themselves, including through participation in Female Engagement Teams and Cultural Support Teams. As Carter noted in 2018 explaining his decision to eliminate gender-based restrictions, more than 300,000 women served in combat environments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many servicewomen sustained combat-related injuries including, most notably, sitting Sen. Tammy Duckworth. (Servicewomen also made headlines during those wars for their participation in the torture of Iraqi civilians and capture by militant groups.)

It’s curious, given this general trajectory of greater integration and notable distinction, that Hegseth was so opposed to having any of the almost 230,000 active-duty servicewomen in combat roles. (As controversy over his comments has mounted, Hegseth has tried to walk back his remarks, calling women “some of our greatest warriors” in a recent interview.) So, why did he think that it’s too “complicated” to serve with women?

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) offers some clues. Beginning in 2017, once all positions were open to women, scholars at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the UCLA Anderson School of Management studied the integration of women into infantry and armor companies, the Army’s most combat-oriented occupations. They found that, contrary to Hegseth’s opinion, integrating women into these previously all-male combat units had little effect on “men’s performance or behavioral outcomes” as understood by the Army’s own metrics. This included little effect on “retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal charges, and medical conditions.” 

However, the study did find that the arrival of women led to a decline in men’s perceptions of company performance and cohesion, confidence in leadership, beliefs about the inclusivity of the workplace, and perceptions of leader responses to harassment and discrimination. Male soldiers were more likely to feel worse about their working conditions after a female officer was integrated into their company. This effect was more pronounced for male officers than male enlisted soldiers (13.9 percent of a standard deviation for male officers vs. 3.9 percent of a standard deviation for enlisted men). 

One of the most obvious interpretations of the study’s results is that men in positions of power feel undermined by women in positions of power, an explanation alluded to in the study. The very presence of women challenges men’s claims to authority. Male officers become officers in part because they are presumed to have leadership qualities, a trait that has historically been considered distinctively male both within and outside of the military. This would explain why male officers seem particularly hostile to the arrival of their female counterparts, whereas enlisted men—who have to listen to officers regardless of the officer’s sex—do not. 

Are there complications related to women serving in combat roles? Of course. But they aren’t the ones Hegseth is thinking of. 

Yes, women’s biology matters, but not because women are the “weaker sex.” Designing for women’s bodies, for both uniforms and gear, is easy to do as proven by NASA four decades ago. Managing women’s menstruation during missions is a real challenge, but one easily addressed through pre-deployment physicals. 

What is more difficult to address is the psychological impact, for men, of having women serve alongside them in combat. The addition of women does not appear to affect the actual effectiveness of a unit, according to the military’s own metrics. It does, however, disrupt the “Band of Brothers” myth, which holds that the all-male combat unit is elite, essential, and exceptional. The myth was used to justify women’s continued exclusion from combat through emotional appeals to a brotherhood of arms. It most recently formed the basis of a slew of vitriol and op-eds on why women should never be allowed to become Navy SEALs or Army Rangers. (To date, 143 women have passed the Army Ranger School and one woman has passed the Navy’s Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman training.)

Accepting that concerns about combat effectiveness are as bogus for integrating women as they were for integrating African Americans raises other complications, such as the registration of women for the Selective Service. Signing women up for the draft has become a thorny culture war issue described by Sen. Ted Cruz as “nuts.” 

The presence of women throughout the U.S. military also complicates narratives around sexual assault, which the Pentagon claims is declining even though outside studies suggest otherwise. The authors of the NBER study suggest that female officers may increase male officers’ awareness of the challenges they face, including sexual harassment and assault. Depressingly, they find that “when a female officer is present upon integration, there is a significantly larger decline in male officers’, relative to male enlisted soldiers’, perceptions of the company’s ability to prevent and respond to sexual harassment/assault.” This is particularly troubling given that a 2021 RAND study found that nearly half of female soldiers who reported sexual harassment indicated that they were targeted by their supervisor or someone in their chain of command. 

Despite the hostility they face from some of their brothers-in-arms, U.S. servicewomen in combat roles aren’t going anywhere, regardless of who the next secretary of defense is. The military is open about its recruiting challenges, which include a growing number of young people who have no interest in serving or who cannot meet the military’s health and fitness requirements. Combined with projections of a demographic decline, the military needs to embrace a model where it is recruiting from 100 percent of the population—whether the men who run it want to or not.