In 12 and a half minutes or less, you must: Run half a mile; scramble up a six-foot wall; lift 16 sandbags, each one roughly the weight of a 6-year-old child; drag a stretcher 100 meters; complete a farmer’s carry with a pair of 40-pound water cans; then run another half mile. Quickly take a breath. Then run four eight-minute miles and finish off with six chin-ups. That’s just day one at Ranger School, the arduous 62-day Army leadership course that washes out half of those who try.
Since the military opened ground-combat units to women, in 2016, 160 have earned their Ranger tabs. And in the vision that Pete Hegseth laid out days before being tapped as defense secretary last year, none of them belong on the front lines.
“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” the Fox News host told a podcaster in November. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”
But to win confirmation as America’s 29th defense secretary, Hegseth needed votes from senators, one of whom, in particular, was a woman who had served in combat. Republican Senator Joni Ernst, who commanded troops in Iraq and Kuwait, remained a holdout. With his future riding on her vote, the nominee suggested under oath that his views had evolved. It wasn’t that he was against women in combat, per se. It was just that he wanted to uphold military excellence.
“Yes, women will have access to ground-combat roles, given the standards remain high,” Hegseth assured the senator at his confirmation hearing. Who could argue with high standards? Ernst voted yes and, with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J. D. Vance, Hegseth’s nomination squeaked by, 51–50.
Six months into his tenure at the Pentagon, the secretary has not announced any plans to reverse the Obama administration’s 2013 decision to open all combat roles to women. But he is moving ahead with an effort to review and potentially overhaul combat and physical-fitness standards. Some view the push as a backdoor attempt to achieve the same goal.
This spring, Hegseth dispatched a newly created team of advisers to elite units and military schools—including bases where Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and Rangers are trained—looking for evidence of lowered standards. According to internal documents I obtained, members of the Secretary of Defense Assessment Team, which is headed by Hegseth’s adviser Eric Geressy, conducted the visits with a goal to “review and restore training standards” for elite units. In a previously unreported move, the documents also indicate a plan to “conduct a new review on Women in Combat (training/warfighting) Study.”
“We do not have the luxury to lower the standards in order to accommodate the lowest common denominator,” the document states. “Service members want a challenge they do not want to be part of a loosing [sic] team and want to serve alongside the best.”
During their visits to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia; and the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, California, members of Hegseth’s assessment team requested detailed information about performance, including raw data on individual candidates.
Hegseth’s suspicion that standards are slipping defies what military officials have told me again and again in recent months: that although all troops must take regular physical-fitness tests specific to their military service, most of which are adjusted for age and gender, they must also undergo separate, so-called occupational tests that are gender-neutral. For combat units, those include intense physical requirements far more strenuous than what other troops must do. An infantry soldier is going to have to sweat more than an accountant. Those job-related standards, the officials have told me, have not been lowered to accommodate women.
“There are myths that have been propagated, and what he’s doing is ginning up that myth again,” one person familiar with Hegseth’s review told me.
A quarter of the way into the 21st century, drones and digital weapons arguably matter more in warfare than push-ups and pull-ups. But in a military styled after the proclivities of Donald Trump and Hegseth, any whiff of special treatment for women or people of color must be eradicated. And changing the physical-fitness standards might turn out to be a means to a more ambitious end, one that could alter the landscape for women in uniform and send a deterrent message to women wishing to join.
“They definitely have a solution in search of a problem,” said the person familiar with the review who, like others, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity. “He keeps looking for data to show that standards have been lowered, and that women can’t hack it.”
The only trouble? The person told me that “there is no data like that.”
Women make up roughly 20 percent of today’s military, but until recently, their roles were sharply limited. Women were not permitted to fly in combat aviation units until 1993 or serve on submarines until 2010. Although thousands of women served on the front lines in support roles in two decades of counterinsurgent warfare following 9/11, they remained officially barred from combat until the past decade.
In 2013, Barack Obama’s second defense secretary, Leon Panetta, announced that the ban on women serving in ground-combat roles would end in the coming years. “Not everyone is going to be able to be a combat soldier,” Panetta said at the time. “But everyone is entitled to a chance.”
In late 2015, after a divisive internal review, Ashton Carter, Obama’s fourth and final defense secretary, ordered the integration of some 200,000 ground-combat roles. Physical and other standards for those units would remain gender-neutral, Carter cautioned, and there would be no quotas for female participation. Of the military services, only the Marine Corps dissented, citing a study that found that mixed-gender Marine units did not perform as well as all-male units. (Carter and others cited flaws with the study, and the Marines were integrated along with the others.)
Since then, female officers have commanded armor and artillery platoons and moved into other ground-combat jobs. Roughly 500 female Marines currently serve in combat roles. Still, the share of women in ground-combat units remains tiny. Fewer than 10 women have passed the Army Special Operations Command’s demanding “Q Course” to become Special Forces soldiers, and no woman has become a Navy SEAL. Of the 1,400 soldiers who completed Ranger School last year, the overwhelming majority were men.
After his nomination, Hegseth was careful to praise women’s “indispendable role” in the military, as he told the podcaster Megyn Kelly in December. “The women of the Pentagon, of our military, are revered, appreciated,” he said. “All I’ve really ever cared about is making sure the standards are maintained.”
But Hegseth’s problem with women in ground-combat units wasn’t just operational; it was moral. In a book he published a few months earlier, Hegseth devotes a chapter to what he calls “the (deadly) obsession with women warriors.” Women can serve as pilots and support troops, and they may sometimes find themselves in the cross fire of the modern battlefield. But placing them in infantry or artillery units, Hegseth argues, causes problems. It distracts male soldiers from their core mission, forces them to compensate for female soldiers’ lesser strength and smaller body size, and makes casualties more likely. Spineless uniformed leaders, ceding to Democratic demands over the past decade, have watered down combat standards to accommodate women, he writes, leaving the military weaker. Thrusting women into jobs focused on killing would also disrupt traditional gender norms. “Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” he writes. “We need moms. But not in the military, and especially not in combat roles.”
Hegseth compares what he sees as the unrealistic goal of willing women’s physical strength to match that of men’s with America’s failed attempts to impose democracy on Afghanistan. He rails against decisions made by the “so-called enlightened class” that would end up costing service member lives. “They don’t care how many battles we lose as long as our dead are diverse,” he writes.
In the weeks after he arrived at the Pentagon in January, Hegseth moved quickly to eliminate what he publicly derided as “woke bullshit,” in line with an executive order that Trump issued on Inauguration Day. Pentagon officials launched a chaotic effort to take down online content containing references to race or gender, removing webpages featuring the first female fighter pilot and Ranger graduate, along with others celebrating the Tuskegee Airmen and Jackie Robinson. The Pentagon reinstated a ban on transgender service members and suspended advisory boards on women in the services. In February, the president abruptly fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first-ever female chief of naval operations, and General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, only the second Black officer to hold that job. Hegseth had attacked both officers in his book for being excessively focused on race or being diversity hires. Neither has commented publicly about their firing.
Hegseth has highlighted the progress the military has made in “reviving the warrior ethos” and eradicating Democratic administrations’ misplaced focus on diversity in the ranks. In Hegseth’s view, there was no racism or sexism problem to fix, so drawing attention to those issues just stirred up discord.
Speaking to Special Operations forces in May, Hegseth said that troops “want to be in disciplined formations that value them not for immutable differences, not for the color of our skin, or gender, but because of honor and integrity and grit and patriotism.” He added: “They want a meritocracy where they can work hard, make themselves better, kick ass and rise up.”
For Hegseth, physical fitness is a trait of the utmost importance. As he told soldiers at the Army War College in April, service members must be “fit, not fat; sharp, not shabby.” Pentagon social media has emphasized his morning physical-training sessions with the troops, doing push-ups from Warsaw to Omaha Beach. The secretary has vowed that standards will be “high, equal, and unwavering.”
In March, Hegseth announced a military-wide review of combat and physical-fitness standards, ordering Pentagon officials to develop plans to distinguish between combat and noncombat jobs and to ensure proper requirements for those roles, including “the ability to carry heavy loads” and exhibiting “speed, strength, agility, and endurance.” To that order, Hegseth added a handwritten addendum: “No existing standard will be lowered in this process.”
In a video released shortly afterward, Hegseth strides along the corridor outside his Pentagon office, speaking straight to the camera as he explains the initiative as a commonsense fix to the military’s failure to enact equal and adequate standards when it integrated women into combat roles.
Last month, in an echo of his earlier, pre-nomination statements, Hegseth posted on his personal X account a news article about Israel’s decision to end a trial program that placed women in combat positions, because of the difficulty they faced in meeting physical requirements. “Worthy [sic] paying attention to,” he wrote. “Israel takes standards & testing very seriously.”
But in those statements, Hegseth has repeatedly mischaracterized the status quo. Notably, Hegseth has not been able to identify evidence of lowered combat requirements in the U.S. military. Instead, the secretary and his supporters have pointed to standards being “informally” lowered, suggesting without evidence that women have been waved through Ranger School or given extra chances because of mandates or pressure from politically attuned bosses.
Spokespeople for Naval Special Warfare, which trains Navy SEALs; for Army Special Operations Command, which trains Special Forces soldiers; and for Fort Benning, where Ranger School is located, all said they have gender-neutral standards. “We ensure our data-[validated], operationally validated, and gender-neutral standards are building the warfighter for today and the future,” Lieutenant Colonel Allie Scott, a spokesperson for Army Special Operations, told me. Jennifer Gunn, a spokesperson at Fort Benning, told me that opportunities to repeat phases of the Ranger course, known as “recycling,” are based on performance. “No demographic or group is afforded preferential treatment,” she said.
One retired female officer who completed Ranger School told me that many men, like many women, who attempt to go into combat jobs are unable to meet the standards. But some from both genders will excel. “The thing that bothers me about the rhetoric about standards being lowered is that no one can exactly tell you what they mean. Was it pull-ups? Was it something else?” the female Ranger School graduate said. “It feels like a sound bite.”
Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, in a statement, said that combat-position standards would be “elite, uniform, and sex neutral, because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman.”
Katherine Kuzminski, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, told me that that is already the case, at least in terms of occupational standards. She said Hegseth’s rhetoric may resonate because of the confusing nature of physical and occupational tests across services and military specialties. “When you look at the broader picture of Hegseth’s previous writings and comments, it sends a message that somehow women aren’t meeting the mark,” Kuzminski said. “In reality, the sex-neutral standards he lays out as his goal in the memo already exist in combat specialities.”
Hegseth’s critics suspect he knows that but has other motives in mind.
“We need to make sure that there isn’t some sort of surreptitious effort ongoing to try to narrow the people who are allowed to serve,” Democratic Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, an Air Force veteran, told me. “I think there is a kind of a lurking theory that the only kind of warrior is a 6-foot-4-inch male Christian guy from the South. But there is also, increasingly, a place for people who are also able to complement that—a warrior who is a thinker, or an engineer, or a number of other kinds of things.”
Houlahan and others caution that, despite the recent recruiting boost that Trump and Hegseth are touting, Americans’ propensity to serve has undergone a long decline, now hovering around 11 percent. America’s future military will need women to help fill the ranks.
Hegseth’s review poses a different challenge for the Navy and the Air Force than it does for the infantry-focused Army and Marine Corps. A fighter pilot most certainly is in combat, but his or her job has much different physical requirements than a Marine’s on the front lines. Serving as a cook on a big ship isn’t normally considered a combat job, but that sailor may be called to command the guns in the event of an attack. And what makes sense for Space Force service members who might sit at a computer all day operating a satellite?
The Navy has age- and gender-normed general physical-fitness standards and separate age- and gender-neutral fitness and occupational standards for six elite professions, including Navy divers, rescue swimmers, and technicians who, among other duties, neutralize underwater explosives. A bomb-disposal tech, for example, must do, in two minutes each, a minimum of six pull-ups and at least 50 push-ups and 50 curl-ups, plus a 500-yard swim and 1.5-mile run in fewer than 21 minutes.
The Air Force has a similar system: gender- and age-adjusted physical-fitness tests for the whole force and then heightened, age- and gender-neutral physical tests for a subset of jobs more similar to ground combat, including combat control and pararescue. Those individuals must perform tasks including carrying a 60-pound load three miles in under 49 minutes and deadlifting at least 270 pounds. “We don’t care how old you are. We do not care what sex you are,” one Air Force official said of those specialties. “Here is the bar. If you’re going to be in this career field, you must meet it.”
All Marines take two different age- and gender-normed fitness tests each year. In addition, Marines in ground-combat roles, regardless of gender, must take an additional job-specific physical test that is gender- and age-neutral. A Marine rifleman, male or female, must simulate evacuating a 205-pound casualty 50 meters, for example, and scaling a 56-inch wall, all while also carrying their 55-pound fighting load.
The Army has had perhaps the most winding, emotionally charged physical-fitness saga.
Last year, a Republican amendment to an annual defense bill mandated higher standards for combat jobs. To help determine what the new minimum standards for those jobs might be, the Army asked RAND to conduct a study that, among other things, showed a drop-off in pass rates for women and National Guard and Reserves soldiers when standards were raised past a certain level. Before Joe Biden left office, Army leaders decided to raise the standards for those combat jobs but keep them gender-normed.
The Army changed course after the Trump administration took over, opting for a gender-neutral standard for 21 combat specialties. An Army official told me that Trump’s new Army secretary, Daniel Driscoll, “was very much, ‘Let’s have high standards and whoever meets those standards, we’re good to go,’” the official said. But in a curious move that the Army has struggled to explain, it kept the test age-adjusted for those jobs, even though the argument for a sole standard had long been that combat doesn’t care who you are—your age, identity, or gender.
Another Army official said that the service’s leadership believed that aligning with Hegseth’s priorities would benefit the Army. “I don’t know how many push-ups you have to do to survive on the battlefield,” the official told me. “But I do know that more is better.”
Many female veterans support gender-neutral, job-related standards. “Women should be allowed to try and fail,” the female Ranger School graduate told me. “You should want people to go to Ranger School. If they fail, maybe they’ll go back and retrain.”
Samantha Weeks, a former fighter pilot who served as a member of a Pentagon advisory board on women until it was suspended, recalled having to bench 80 percent of her body weight when she was in pilot training in the late 1990s. It was hard, but achievable. “I think there is not a woman out there in the military who doesn’t want the standard to be the standard,” she told me.
But many current and former officials also say the military needs to do a better job in developing evidence-based physical criteria. “You just have to make sure the requirements are rational to the role and aren’t a vestige of a different era,” Alex Wagner, who served as the Air Force’s assistant secretary for personnel during the Biden administration, told me. “Pete Hegseth’s understanding of the military seems frozen in 1980s action films. But today’s battlefield isn’t going to be Rambo hacking his way through jungles.”
Pentagon officials say they have been informed that Hegseth’s office is preparing to release a new, military-wide physical-fitness test. It was not immediately clear whether that test, should it materialize, would replace the service tests or whether it would be gender-neutral. Any significantly higher standard could have the greatest impact on National Guard and Reserves troops, which typically do worse on fitness exams than active-duty personnel.
Weeks, the former fighter pilot, recalled being the only female pilot in her squadron when she flew long missions over Iraq as part of Operation Northern Watch in 2000. Unable to use the “piddle pack” that male pilots used to relieve themselves, and unwilling to opt for “tactical dehydration,” which could be dangerous during a 12-hour mission, she used a DIY solution involving a neonatal face mask and a surgical tube.
In the years since, women have expanded their presence across the force and, along the way, earned greater recognition that they may have different needs, but that doesn’t mean that they’re less capable of doing the job. This year, the Air Force rolled out a new alternative for the male piddle pack to make missions easier for female pilots.
“I had men who told me, ‘I don’t want to talk about that. Go find a female,’” Weeks recalled of trying to find support in her unit. “‘Well, what female can I talk to?’ I said. ‘There are no others.’”
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