Published in The War Horse
Written by Sonner Kehrt

In Army Ranger school, Emelie Vanasse once sat under a poncho in the pouring rain and shivered so hard her entire body cramped up. She strapped on a rucksack that weighed more than 100 pounds and climbed a mountain. Deep in the middle of the woods, she hallucinated a donut shop.

When Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to make it through Ranger training in 2015, Vanasse had taped their pictures above her desk.

“I’m next,” she told herself then. “It’s gonna be me.”

Less than two years later, she woke up at three a.m., shaved her head—one-quarter inch all around—and drove to Camp Rogers, Georgia, to endure 62 days of crawling through the mud, rappelling down mountainsides, and leading fellow soldiers in training raids and ambushes while hungry and sleep-deprived. She graduated with another woman as the fourth and fifth female Rangers in the Army’s 249-year history.

Today, 160 women have earned their Ranger tabs, and the debate over whether women should serve in combat positions alongside men is generally considered settled.

Or it had been, until very recently.

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to reexamine the standards under which women have gained entry into combat roles. The month before that, he fired the former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti without giving a reason, leaving the military without a single female four-star officer. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman fired the only other four-star woman, former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan, on Inauguration Day.

Hegseth’s mission to refocus on a “warrior ethos” has eliminated groups that worked to remove unequal barriers to service and erased women and other minority groups’ accomplishments from Defense Department websites.

And on Thursday, the Defense Secretary took the unusual step of removing all current members of its independent advisory committees—including the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service, one of the oldest, known by its acronym, DACOWITS. The committee has been a standard-bearer for women’s integration into the military, advising defense secretaries from both parties on every issue surrounding women in the military dating back to the Truman administration. For decades, it advocated to allow women to serve in combat roles.

Advocates for women in the military worry the move signals Hegseth may be looking to appoint committee members who agree with him—in the past, he has been vocal that women are not suited to serve in combat.

“We’ve been in combat. We’ve been in combat since Deborah Sampson and the Revolutionary War,” said Octavia Harris, a retired Navy command master chief who served on DACOWITS until last week. “By virtue of just being a woman in the military, you know you’re going to have to prove yourself time and time again.”

It’s been a decade since the military opened combat roles to women, and thousands of women have served in those positions. Women make up nearly 20% of the total military, and surveys of active duty troops have shown that men who serve alongside women tend to support a fully gender-integrated military. Even the Marine Corps—which long pushed back against integrating its recruit training—has begun graduating mixed-gender battalions.

Even as questions swirl around Hegseth’s future, people who have been involved in women’s integration in the military worry that reopening this debate means the Pentagon may look for more ways to limit women’s ability to serve in an equal capacity to men—and could kneecap its ability to recruit its next general of soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

“What if those people happen to be some of the best and brightest and most innovative and lethal warriors for tomorrow’s generation of servants, and we lose them because they don’t see that this is a place where they are going to be wanted or valued?” said Samantha Weeks, the first female solo pilot on the Air Force’s Thunderbirds demonstration flight team and a former member of DACOWITS. “What does that do to our country?”

A Seven-Decade Legacy

During World War II, some 400,000 women served in the military, in each branch’s women’s corps. In 1948, Harry Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which permitted women to join the military alongside men.

Three years later, Defense Secretary George Marshall established DACOWITS to help him better recruit women into the military. In the nearly 75 years since, the committee has worked on everything from lifting the ban on women in combat to developing guidance for pregnant servicemembers and single parents to pushing for boots that fit women’s feet. The Defense Department and Congress, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, has adopted nearly 95% of its recommendations over the decades.

To be sure, the Pentagon is no stranger to politics. In 2021, then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a review of all independent defense advisory committees—which advise the secretary on everything from preventing sexual assault to business and science policies—after the previous acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller had replaced committee members on some of the boards with loyalists in the final months of the first Trump administration.

Austin’s review of DACOWITS in particular sparked an immediate outcry. In a letter signed by every female veteran in Congress at the time—on both sides of the aisle—lawmakers argued for Austin to keep the committee.

“We are the faces of what DACOWITS has meant for women in the military,” they wrote. “We do not believe its work is complete.”

Yielding to the pressure, Austin kept the committee with all the same members.

When Trump returned to the White House, the Defense Department told all independent advisory committees in February they would be required to summarize how their work benefited a “warrior ethos … and how it aligns to the President’s and Secretary of Defense’s objectives,” according to reporting by Military Times. In March, Hegseth informed all the committees they were under a 45-day review—which culminated in the dismissal of all committee members last week.

The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment.

Women in uniform and female veterans in Congress told The War Horse that the committee’s work is fundamental to women’s success in the military.

“Given the actions of this administration, now more than ever, women in the military need a dedicated organization to fight for them,” said Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat from New Jersey, who flew helicopters in the Navy.

“Women make up an increasingly significant portion of our military, and they deserve to be heard,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former Air Force officer, told The War Horse.

They and others said that women still face an uphill battle when serving in uniform.

“There are still biases. There are still people that make mistakes. There are still challenges with regards to training, challenges with regards to recruitment and retention, challenges that exist for integration,” said Cari Thomas, a retired Coast Guard admiral who served on the committee from 2017 to 2021. “Oversight is an important element of any organization.”

‘Someone in Power Doesn’t Want Me to Be Here’

When Vanasse reported to Ranger school, she knew it wouldn’t be easy, physically or mentally.

“I remember being terrified standing outside the gates of Camp Rogers,” she said.

But she was also thinking about how much harder things might be because she was a woman.

“I was very aware the population of objective graders hated my guts for even showing up to the school.”

It had been barely two years since women had been admitted to the school, and there was a lot of opposition. Charley Falletta, another female Ranger who went to training several months after Vanasse, also said she felt that instructors didn’t want her to succeed.

“You realize, ‘Oh my gosh, someone with a lot of power over my life doesn’t want me to be here,’” she said, “‘solely on the basis of me being a woman.’”

But Falletta said she saw things change. While she didn’t initially make it through training, she returned four years later and passed, pinning on her Ranger tab in 2021. She remembered an instructor looking at her quizzically while they paddled a Zodiac through the swamps of Florida.

“Have you been here before?” he asked her. Falletta told him she’d failed out four years earlier.

“Well,” he said, “we’re glad you’re here.”

Concerns about women in combat positions a decade after they were first admitted are a “top-down, imposed, artificial, made-up concern,” Falletta said.

“This is not a problem that you have a groundswell of people who are like, ‘Gosh, we have women in these units and they can’t do their jobs.’”

Last month, Hegseth issued a memo directing the military to review its physical fitness standards and to examine how they have changed since Jan. 1, 2015. That’s the year the Army announced the first gender-integrated Ranger training class—the first of the military’s special forces communities to include women. A second memo, two weeks after Hegseth’s first, directed the services to develop gender-neutral standards for combat arms.

Women who have served in combat roles have pointed out that Hegseth’s memo seems rooted in a misunderstanding of current standards. When removing the ban on women in combat was under debate, one of the biggest concerns circulating was that combat standards would be lowered to accommodate women—something that did not happen.

“We knew that putting women into these positions and being able to perform at the same level, for whatever standard it was, was important,” said Thomas, who served on DACOWITS as women began to integrate into combat roles. “Performance in the battlefield was one of our standing goals that we wanted to work with the services to achieve.”

In general, service members in the military take a yearly physical fitness test. Those tests are normed for both gender and age. But service members who want to go into combat arms take other tests, which are graded the same for everyone, regardless of age or gender. And all evaluations in special forces have been gender-neutral since the programs were opened to women.

Just over a week ago, the Army announced changes to the yearly Army fitness test that appear to be in response to Hegseth’s memo. The new test will require men and women going into most combat specialties to reach the same minimum score.

In a speech at the Army War College this week, Hegseth said that combat standards needed to be “high, equal, and unwavering.”

However, the new Army test exempts certain specialities from the new standards, like artillery crewmen, which currently have very few women—but not artillery officers, where there are more women. And the Army has said that while the new combat standards are the same for men and women, they will be adjusted for age.

Starting in January 2026, soldiers in combat specialties who do not meet the new combat standards can be reclassified into other positions.

‘Lethality, Lethality, Lethality’

The review of DACOWITS and the reexamination of fitness standards come at a time when Hegseth has been promising to restore the military’s “lethality.”

“[The] job is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality,” Hegseth told reporters on Capitol Hill in December. “Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening.”

Lethality is a complex idea, soldiers say.

“What does it mean to be lethal? What are the components?” said Kris Fuhr, a former Army officer who has advised the Army on integrating women into Ranger training and combat arms. “Running fast and lifting heavy things—that’s a component of lethality. But also understanding complex problems, endurance, flexibility, the ability to gain trust and hold trust, the ability to lead under terrible conditions and pressure—those are all components of lethality as well.”

She spoke with The War Horse after watching the Army’s Best Ranger competition earlier this month, where, for the first time, a woman competed in the grueling 62-hour competition. Rangers there are graded on physical ability, but also on technical, tactical, and cognitive ability. First Lt. Gabrielle White and her partner Capt. Seth Deltenre came in 14 out of 52 teams.

Fuhr said White’s performance should end the debate over whether women can hack it in combat roles. “That conversation is over,” she said.

Neither Hegseth nor Trump have specified a definition of “lethality.” An executive order Trump signed shortly after taking office said that DEI programs “undermine leadership, merit, and unit cohesion, thereby eroding lethality and force readiness.”

That order precipitated the removal of Pentagon articles celebrating women and people of color and came as the service branches moved to dismantle groups dedicated to studying obstacles facing minority groups in the military. Advocates say those groups helped to make the military more effective.

One of the groups, the Air Force women’s initiative team—which DACOWITS pointed to as an example for other branches to emulate in 2023—worked to develop body armor that fit women’s bodies and policies for pregnant pilots. The group was shut down following Trump’s executive order in January. And the Air Force this month reverted back to 2019, restricting pregnant pilots from flying in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy or in high-performance aircraft anytime during pregnancy. But earlier this month, the Air Force debuted one of the team’s major projects, an in-flight bladder relief system for female pilots, who have long been unable to easily pee during long flights.

Weeks noted that women have been flying in the Air Force for decades before their most basic biological needs were addressed. “That’s a long time to have women to be part of a community and not have the readiness and lethality to be the most capable warfighter.”

While it took nearly a half-century for the Air Force to develop the technology for its female pilots to be able to relieve their bladders in-flight, Weeks pointed out another decades-long gap that thwarted women in the military.

Women weren’t allowed to fly in the military for 30 years after World War II. In 1974, the Army and the Navy opened pilot jobs to women—a milestone heralded at the time as an important “first.” But it wasn’t.

More than a thousand female pilots served in the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots program during World War II, ferrying all types of military aircraft more than 60 million miles, transporting cargo, and towing targets for live-fire practice. Thirty-eight WASPs died. But after the war, women were banned from flying for the military.

“What could have been done in those 30 years? What innovations and ingenuity or different perspectives were lost because this group of capable aviators was no longer allowed to do it?” Weeks said.

“Does our nation have the ability to pause, stop, restart, and then pick back up?” she asked. “I would say the answer is no.”

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This War Horse story was reported by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.