Updated January 7, 2026 at 8:58 AM AKST
The Pentagon is mounting a six-month review of women in ground combat jobs, to ensure what it calls the military "effectiveness" of having several thousand female soldiers and Marines in infantry, armor and artillery, according to a memo obtained by NPR.
Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel Anthony Tata wrote in a memo last month that the effort is to determine the "operational effectiveness of ground combat units 10 years after the Department lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles."
Tata requested Army and Marine Corps leaders to provide data on the readiness, training, performance, casualties and command climate of ground combat units and personnel. The services are to provide points of contact no later than Jan. 15 to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit corporation that assists the government on national security issues. The memo says the data should include "all available metrics describing that individual's readiness and ability to deploy (including physical, medical, and other measures of ability to deploy.)"
Moreover, the seven-page memo calls for any internal research and studies — not publicly available — on "the integration of women in combat."
"We should not have women in combat roles"
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson wrote in an email to NPR that the study is to "ensure standards are met and the United States maintains the most lethal military. Our standards for combat arms positions will 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. Under [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, the Department of War's [sic] will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda—this is common sense."
Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, opposed women in ground combat units while he was a Fox News host and author. "I'm straight up 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 November 2024 podcast hosted by Shawn Ryan. But during his confirmation hearing last year, he softened his stance, saying women can serve in combat roles as long as they meet the same standards as men.
During a September address to admirals and generals at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Hegseth announced that women must meet the "highest male standard."
"Any place where tried-and-true physical standards were altered, especially since 2015, when combat standards were changed to ensure females could qualify, must be returned to their original standard." But he did not say he was barring women from ground combat roles.
"When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral," Hegseth said. "If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result."
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran and Purple Heart recipient, criticized the Pentagon review, warning that taking women off the battlefield "would put us at a direct disadvantage to our adversaries."
"Contrary to the misguided beliefs of this Administration, women have always made our military stronger and are more qualified to serve in their roles than Pete Hegseth is to serve as Secretary of Defense," the Illinois Democrat said in a statement. "This pretextual, rushed effort by the Trump Administration is clearly intended to shrink the number of women who bravely serve in combat roles, which would be devastating to our military readiness."
Women currently in ground combat units
Of all soldiers serving in combat units in the Army, women make up a small fraction: A total of some 3,800 women serve in infantry, armor and artillery. Among them are more than 150 women who completed the arduous Ranger training. A small number of women — around 10 or so — passed Green Beret training. The Marines have about 700 females in these ground combat jobs. And in all these jobs, women must meet the same standards as their male counterparts.
Ellen Haring — a senior research fellow at Women in International Security, a West Point graduate and a retired Army colonel with 30 years in uniform — dismissed the Pentagon review as a way to exclude women from ground combat.
"It's exactly what [Hegseth] said all along," she said. "He's against women in combat, and he's going to get them out. It's going to be an effort to prove women don't belong."
Meanwhile, Kris Fuhr, a West Point graduate who worked on gender integration for the Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., said an Army study between 2018 to 2023 found that women performed well in ground combat units and, in some cases, had higher scores than male soldiers. She called the upcoming Pentagon study "a solution for a problem that doesn't exist."
Then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced at a Pentagon press conference in 2015 that women would be admitted to all ground combat positions, saying it made no sense to exclude half the population from serving in those jobs.
"As long as they qualify and meet the standards," Carter said, "women will now be able to contribute to our mission in ways they could not before."
But the decision was a controversial one, especially among the Marine Corps. Then-Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Joe Dunford, didn't attend the press conference and instead put out a statement saying: "my responsibility is to ensure his decision is properly implemented."
Marines privately bristled at the announcement. They conducted a training exercise in the Mojave Desert in 2015 that found gender-integrated units were slower, less lethal and more prone to injury than all-male units. Marine officers also said accepting women would lead to greater risk, meaning more Marine combat casualties. Carter said he saw it differently.
While the Marine exercise found that teams that included women were overall less effective, Carter pointed out that the study failed to focus on individual achievement. Advocates of women in combat say the exercise failed to consider high-achieving women in those combat roles.
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