Women warriors and the war on woke
ON JANUARY 14TH Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defence, will be grilled by senators on his suitability for the job. He will be quizzed on allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking. He is also certain to face questions about women and war. “We should not have women in combat roles,” he said in a recent podcast. He acknowledged that women had served “amazingly” in America’s armed forces and that female fighter pilots were welcome, but argued that women were simply not strong enough to serve in infantry, armour and artillery units. Since admitting women, “the standards have lowered,” he said.
Mr Hegseth’s intervention comes after a decade of integration in America. Some armed forces lifted restrictions on women years before: Sweden’s and Canada’s in 1989, Finland’s in the 1990s. In others the change is more recent. America gradually eased its rules in the 1990s and 2000s, but its biggest step came in 2015 when Barack Obama’s administration opened all combat positions to women (see chart 1). Britain made the same move a year later, declaring that women could serve on the front lines, beginning in the armoured units and expanding to the infantry by 2018. That experience has thrown up a number of lessons.
Mr Hegseth complains that sex differences in “bone density and lung capacity and muscle strength” preclude women from combat. This has two aspects. One is the heightened risk of injury during training. A study by the British Army found that the rate of musculoskeletal injuries in initial training was twice as high in women as men. Female trainees were three times more likely to suffer a stress fracture—and ten times more likely to suffer one at the hip—than men.
The second aspect is the physical ability to perform the tasks involved in combat. Some of the most detailed evidence of this has come from a study by the US Marine Corps, in which mixed units, each including one or two women, were pitted against all-male ones in a battery of realistic tests—marksmanship, loading artillery shells and the like. In 93 out of 134 tasks, the all-male units performed better. Only in two did the mixed units come top. The time it took to evacuate casualties was higher in mixed units (see chart 2). The study was controversial. Ray Mabus, then secretary of the navy, criticised its design and overruled its conclusions, demanding that the marines integrate regardless.
Some argue that technology has made physical strength less important to soldiering. That may be true of some roles, such as for pilots. But, in practice, strength still matters. Anthony King, professor of war studies at Exeter University, who recently wrote an internal report for the British Army on its culture, including the role of women, points out that the average infantryman in the second world war carried around 20kg of equipment in battle compared with 36kg carried in Helmand province in Afghanistan, with loads routinely hitting 45kg. Even among men, he notes, only 30% of recruits meet the requirements for serving in combat arms and even fewer actively want to serve in the infantry.
In Canada women make up almost 17% of the total force, but just 4% of the infantry. In 2023 in Britain only ten female recruits started infantry and armour basic training. Just 85 women have joined those two branches since 2019. Even in the Israel Defence Forces, which are widely held up as an example of successful integration, female soldiers serve overwhelmingly in support units. Some armed forces have targets, such as Britain’s wish for 30% of new recruits to be women by 2030. However, Mr King is sceptical that this will mean many more women serving in the infantry: “In combat arms and infantry there is no historical or contemporary evidence for the notion you could even get close to 10%.”
Mr Hegseth and those who share his views do not just argue that women are unsuited to combat. They also believe that the presence of women undermines cohesion. There is much less evidence supporting this view. The conscript forces of the 20th century often relied on male bonding (and racial solidarity) to gel their unskilled troops, says Mr King, but in modern professional armies, good training is an effective substitute. A study commissioned by Britain’s defence ministry found that men did not rate cohesion as being weaker when women were present. Women themselves experienced lower cohesion than men. But the study was not clear on whether that was because they were women, or because women tended to serve for less time, knew other team members less well and were likely to be more junior.
Mr King says that, in his experience, there are occasions when standards may have been relaxed to accommodate female recruits. What is more common is that women are judged by a double standard. “A successful woman will be given the status of an honorary man and treated as a good bloke,” says Mr King. “But the minute she makes a mistake, the mistake gets gendered.” That is compounded by other factors, including sexual abuse.
Still, the climate for women is improving in some ways. In the US Army, unwanted sexual contact affected 6.8% of women in 2023, down from 8.4% in 2021. In Britain 2% of rape cases and 6% of broader sexual offending cases resulted in conviction in the civilian justice system, compared with 8% and 23% respectively in the military system. Culture is also changing more broadly. “Ten years ago you would never get senior people talking about menstruation, bras or anything like that with anything other than a sense of profound embarrassment,” says Andrew Murrison, a former British junior defence minister. “These days, it is common parlance.”
The experience of integrating women into combat roles has been “overwhelmingly positive”, says Mr Murrison. Opponents like Mr Hegseth are vocal, but they are in a minority. Even in 2013, two-thirds of Americans supported integration, which has expanded the potential pool of recruits at a time when armed forces in America and Europe are struggling to fill their ranks.
Many of the challenges of integrating women have nothing to do with combat or culture wars, points out Katherine Kuzminski of the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), a think-tank. Some of these are purely practical. “I used to have one set of barracks,” commanders might ask, she says, “but what do I do if I now have two women and 100 men? Do I need to build an entirely separate barracks?”
Others are about providing a level playing field. Men have often had access to training programmes that give them a better shot when they join the armed forces, says Ms Kuzminski. Yet that can be addressed by relatively simple interventions. The Marine Corps found that a 12-week training programme led to a 30% increase in the number of women who could perform the requisite number of pull-ups.
In the past, women’s body armour tended to be scaled-down versions of male armour. Yet this puts disproportionate pressure on women’s hips. A study by the US Army’s special-operations command in 2021 found that 44% of women had experienced problems with the fit of equipment and pointed out the absence of devices to allow female aviators and flight crew to urinate. “Gender bias is deeply embedded into staff processes and equipping, at all echelons,” it concluded.
In many ways, these are old issues. The first female American paratroopers graduated from the army’s airborne school more than 50 years ago, in 1973. Two decades later America lifted its “risk rule”, which decreed that women could not be assigned even to non-combat support positions—say, as an intelligence officer—if they would be at the same risk of becoming involved in combat as a front-line unit. Thousands of women received the combat action medal in Afghanistan and Iraq, where there was often little distinction between a rear area and a combat zone. That distinction has been further blurred by the growing range, precision and proliferation of drones and missiles. As much as Mr Hegseth may hanker after a more sexist past, he cannot turn back time itself. ■
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