President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination to head the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is facing a barrage of opposition because he has expressed his belief that women should not serve in the military. Although the media is largely united against him, opinions among military and military experts are very divided.
Will Thibeau, a former Army Ranger with multiple combat experience, told Fox News Digital that he wholeheartedly agrees with Hegseth.
“I think that recently Secretary Hegseth has stated the simple truths that for the past 12 years have been commonly understood and affirmed by the very top leaders in the Pentagon, the rank and file of the military and the culture as a whole, that war and in particular. men and men only,” he said.
“Natural sexuality and the relationship between men and women is a reality that you cannot avoid,” he added. “And when you create the stress, the physical uncertainty, the physical proximity and the unique conditions in that biological reality, you get the breakdown of what would be a normal military group, or a military force built to fight a war.”
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FILE – This Sept. 18 file photo 2012 shows female soldiers training on the firing range while wearing new body armor at Fort Campbell, Ky. Only a small fraction of Army women say they would like to go to one of the newly opened combat jobs, but those few who do, say they want a job that will put them in the middle of the war, according to preliminary results of a service survey of nearly 170,000 women. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)
Hegseth, 44, is a former Fox News host and Army veteran who served in two combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and an additional deployment to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Trump nominated Hegseth to the position of Secretary of Defense, one of the most influential positions in his cabinet, on November 13, less than a week after winning the election. The president-elect said of Hegseth that “no one is more pro-military” and “with Pete in charge, America’s enemies are watching.”
However, Hegseth is facing a lot of backlash from Democrats and the media, especially for his comments on the Nov. 7 episode of the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast where he said, “I mean right. They don’t have women in combat roles.”
Hegseth asserted that women serving in combat roles “didn’t make us more successful, didn’t make us more dangerous” and “made fighting more difficult.”
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Host Pete Hegseth during “FOX & Friends” at Fox News Channel Studios on May 27, 2022 in New York City. (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
He was not opposed to women serving in the military or even in non-military roles such as the Air Force. Instead, she made the point that the US military has been lowering its physical standards to allow more women to qualify for combat roles, something she said increases the risk of combat-related deaths.
She said, “I admire the female service members who give so incredibly well,” but asserted that “everything about women working together complicates the situation and the difficulty in combat means the casualties are worse.”
He also criticized the top echelons of the military leadership for changing standards and prioritizing fulfilling different assignments over combat effectiveness. He cited a 2015 study by the Marine Corps that found co-ed units performed “significantly worse” in terms of combat effectiveness than all-male units.
“Between bone strength and lung strength and muscle strength, men and women are just different,” he said. “So, I’m fine if you keep the standards where everyone else is, and if there are, you know, hard-charging women who meet that standard, fine, fine, join the military. But that’s not the case. What’s happened is the standards have gone down.”
Pete Hegseth and Kayleigh McEnany will be part of Fox News’s Independence Day program. (Fox Stories)
Hegseth noted that he was not advocating for a change to be made at this time, commenting; “Think about the demagoguery in Washington, DC, if you were actually responding to it, you know, ‘We’ve got to get women out of the fight.’
“As a way of denying everyone out there,” he added, “we have all worked with women and they are beautiful, our institutions should not encourage that in places where … .”
Despite this, Ellen Haring, a retired Army colonel, told Fox News Digital that many women and men in the military are concerned that Hegseth will become secretary and institute these changes.
“The women in these combat jobs and many of them are six, eight years old now, they are motivated and worried about the idea that they might lose their jobs,” she said.
According to Haring, there are 2,500 women currently serving in combat roles on the ground, in the military, in the armed forces and special forces. He also said that 152 women have received Army Ranger tabs and there are currently ten women in the 75th Ranger Regiment.
He said that despite the fact that only a quarter of all West Point Academy graduates are women, they account for a third of all lieutenants commissioned in the armed forces.
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US Army Fort Leonard Wood (US Army Fort Leonard Wood)
“There is no indication that any of these units were damaged by their presence,” he said. “So, Hegseth says that adding women to these units will create a degree of complication and somehow put people at risk. That hasn’t happened in any unit that we’ve seen so far. So, I don’t see it.” I don’t know where you come up with these ideas.”
Besides not harming the units, Haring went on to say that women helped improve the professionalism of the units, especially the infantry.
“The children’s units had a habit of singing and abusing each other,” she said. “Their presence there has made that kind of behavior stand out and has actually eliminated a lot of it in the army. So, this kind of brutal behavior that the military units engage in is gradually eliminated by the presence of women.”
Similarly, Captain Micah Ables, an Army Infantry company commander, told Fox News Digital that the women in his unit have improved the company’s “team player” attitude and expanded its capabilities when deployed.
Major General Laura J. Richardson, who is the first woman to be the deputy commander of the military wing, listened while sitting behind the Chief of Army, Gen. Mark Milley (L) during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the implementation of a resolution to open all ground combat units to women on Capitol Hill in Washington, February 2, 2016. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
Ables’ first deployment to Afghanistan was with an all-male unit, however, he later served with one of the first integrated infantry companies. He said that although there were setbacks and tensions, the female soldiers in his unit showed their ability and the company got used to it without any major problem.
He said many women in his unit have proven to be leaders and soldiers with physical and mental skills under him.
“When I took over a mixed gender company, I didn’t really know what to expect,” he said. “But they held on, and they did what they had to do to be professional.”
X The military provides feedback on the autonomous equipment decontamination system (US Army)
On the other hand, Jessie Jane Duff, a retired female gunnery sergeant in the Marines, told Fox News Digital that allowing women to fill combat roles is “a dangerous mistake.”
He also cited a study conducted by the Marines that found that integrated units were only 60 percent as effective as all-male units and women were between 20 and 30 percent more likely to be injured.
“It’s from a biological level. We’re not equal,” he said. “Because of the lack of testosterone, women take longer to recover and rebuild muscle because they don’t have that testosterone. Even though men get seriously injured from training they have a higher level of ability to get back into the fighting phase and do something. .”
“Why are you destroying the efficiency of our infantry? You are destroying it because you are trying to achieve equality,” he continued. “You may have a chance to pass, but you should not be offered a seat because of your gender when a more qualified man could take that seat.”
US Marine Corps personnel participate in the traditional Eagle, Globe and Anchor ceremony. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images) (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
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Ultimately, Anna Simons, a retired professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, told Fox News Digital that it comes down to differences and similarities.
“Women have been fighting since ancient times,” he said. “They protect their children, they protect their property, they protect their husbands, they fight bravely, it’s true. But the issue is not women fighting. The issue is women in positions, small groups of people where everyone needs to change and be equally skilled in certain fighting skills.”
“The purpose of fighting is to use violence and to be able to absorb violence,” he said. “Therefore there must be a similarity or similarity between people so that they can exchange easily when it comes to basic skills, shooting, movement and communication.”
“Everybody needs a foundation for that, and you want the foundation to be as high as possible,” he concluded. “That means people need to be less similar than more different in their abilities.”
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