Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has signaled that he is prepared to confront entrenched Pentagon orthodoxies in order to rebuild an American warfighting machine focused on winning wars rather than satisfying ideological fashions.
According to Conservative Daily News, that resolve now extends to challenging one of the most sacrosanct dogmas of the modern defense establishment: the insistence that every military unit must serve as a showcase for equal opportunity between men and women, even in the most physically demanding combat roles.
Hegseth has authorized a long-overdue study to examine the real-world consequences of dismantling all-male ground combat units, a move that could mark the first serious effort in years to restore lethality, standards, and battlefield effectiveness as the central priorities of U.S. warfighting policy.
For decades, the bipartisan defense bureaucracy has treated inclusivity in combat formations as an unquestionable good, even as evidence quietly accumulated that this social experiment carried serious costs. From 1996 to 2017, multiple studies showed that sex-integrated combat units consistently underperformed compared with all-male units, yet when the Obama administration abruptly opened every combat role to women, neither party demanded rigorous follow-up research to measure the impact of that sweeping decision.
Hegseth is now forcing policymakers, senior Pentagon officials, and flag officers to confront data they have long preferred to ignore. While objectivity and careful analysis are essential, the likely outcome is hardly mysterious: Basic biology tells us that most women cannot meet male physical standards for combat.
The Pentagon has implicitly acknowledged this reality for years by requiring female candidates for certain combat roles to meet the same physical benchmarks as men. The department has quietly conceded the point for years, and Hegseths initiative will simply formalize that concession by placing it squarely on the public record. In doing so, he is challenging a political class that has grown accustomed to treating the armed forces as a laboratory for social engineering rather than a shield for the nation.
The empirical record is already substantial. In 2015, the Marine Corps conducted a major study involving 400 volunteers in combat exercises, 25 percent of whom were women, and the results were stark: sex-integrated teams consistently underperformed compared with all-male counterparts.
The top quartile of female participants overlapped only with the bottom quartile of men in anaerobic capacity, a critical measure for high-intensity combat tasks. Women completed tasks more slowly, shot less accurately, and sustained injuries at more than double the rate of men (40.5% vs 18.8%), a disparity that cannot be wished away by rhetoric about empowerment or equality.
These findings are not outliers but part of a broad scientific consensus. Research published in outlets such as the National Institutes of Health, the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has repeatedly confirmed that differences in strength, muscular development, and bone density translate into lower performance and higher injury rates for women in physically punishing environments. On the battlefield, where slower means dead and every additional casualty weighs down the entire squad, these are not abstract statistics but life-and-death realities.
Researchers have already measured this disparity, and the real test now lies not in gathering more data but in determining whether elected officials and defense leaders are willing to act on it. Study after study merely reinforces what common sense and human experience have long recognized: 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 numbers confirm what instinct and tradition already suggest, yet the case against women in combat is not confined to physical metrics alone. As the authors wife Michellea West Point graduate and Army veteran who served on a Cultural Support Team embedded with elite combat unitshas argued in The American Mind, the deeper issue concerns the moral and civilizational meaning of sending women into direct ground combat.
Many conservatives, wary of being caricatured as hostile to womens service, fall into the trap of framing the debate purely as a question of meritocracy: let anyone serve who can meet the standards. That formulation sounds fair in theory but collapses in practice, because the Army itself undermines the premise by maintaining 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 identical, the argument for a pure meritocracy would already be settled, but the very existence of dual benchmarks reflects an unspoken admission that biology is not a social construct, and war does not grade on a curve.
Beneath the policy details lies a more profound question: what kind of society sends its daughters to die in wars while pretending this represents progress. Modern feminism has recast combat as just another professional credential, another glass ceiling to shatter, as though the purpose of infantry service were rsum-building rather than closing with and destroying the enemy.
But combat is not a career opportunity. It is organized violence, and throughout history the burden of that violence has fallen overwhelmingly on men, not because women lack courage, but because civilizations that sacrifice their mothers on the battlefield do not, and should not, survive. Hegseths study may finally compel Washington to face what every infantryman already knows, but the unresolved issue is whether political leaders possess the fortitude to translate those findings into policy.
Hegseths study will not reveal anything the infantryman does not already know, or anything the data has not already shown. What it will do is strip away the comforting illusions that have allowed lawmakers and bureaucrats to treat the armed forces as a stage for symbolic progress while others bear the consequences.
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 recall that the purpose of a military is to win wars, and that victory demands we send our most capable, not our most representative, a principle that runs directly counter to the diversity-obsessed ethos now dominant in elite circles.
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, and in commissioning this study, Hegseth has done his part. Now we will see if anyone in Washington has the nerve to walk through it.
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