Women in Combat

Friend of the Blog Amy McGrath has an op-ed on the assertions by Pete Hegseth that women don’t belong in combat:

Leave aside the fact that most young American men today do not meet military fitness requirements — and that, without women, who now make up 18 percent of the active-duty military, the services’ recent recruiting challenges would be much worse. The fact, as a recent Brookings Institution event with several retired military officers underscored, is that military standards have not been lowered. Nor have easier standards been adopted for women. In military specialties where relatively fewer meet the necessary physical standards, such as the infantry, there are smaller concentrations of women — as we might expect.

What has happened over the past two to three decades is that the military has become less arbitrary and more specific about the standards it requires military personnel to meet — largely because of the integration of women. For example, movie-watchers who remember the fabled sand obstacle course in 1982’s “An Officer and a Gentleman” may be interested to learn that particular challenge for future naval aviators has been changed — because it was recognized to be of limited relevance to their core duties.

There’s a lot of interesting work being done on what precisely modern military organizations should demand in terms of physical fitness, all of which has to be based on expectations of how that fitness will intersect with duties. A Space Force Guardian, for example, needs to be fit in a different way than an Army infantryman, even as the organization retains an interest in the physical condition of its members. We’re also becoming increasingly aware that some of the metrics that we’ve used for fitness don’t work very well in practice. At the same time, experience in Ukraine (which is featuring an extremely old set of mostly male bodies) seems to confirm that certain combat situations benefit from certain physical capabilities. As someone with a lot of interest in how organizations manage human capital, it’s a fascinating conversation to watch.

And absolutely none of it has anything to do with Pete Hegseth’s inane babbling about gender.

… I’ll add that I don’t think Hegseth will actually pull the trigger on a lot of his rhetoric, both because of the recruiting problems McGrath identifies and the fact that there are a lot of rural and exurban white women who have made careers in the military, and a lot of them vote GOP.