A Single Standard for Combat Readiness
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s uniform standard for physical fitness marks the end of preferential treatment in combat roles.
This is more like it.
For a full week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been buffeted by events — or, rather, by a single event: the embarrassing inclusion of Atlantic fabulist Jeffrey Goldberg in a high-level Signal group chat about an upcoming attack on Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
Instead of acknowledging the mistake, taking the “L,” and quickly pivoting to friendlier turf — Yep, one of our staffers screwed up, but how about all those Houthis we greased? — Hegseth and some other very serious and capable patriots turned a Tylenol moment into a weeklong migraine.
That all ended yesterday when Hegseth issued a memorandum that men and women will be held to the same physical fitness requirements if they want to serve in combat roles. “For far too long,” Hegseth said in an X post, “we allowed standards to slip, and different standards for men and women in combat arms, MOS’s, and jobs. That’s not acceptable. We need to have the same standard, male or female, in our combat roles, to ensure our men and women … have the best possible leaders and the highest possible standards that are not based at all on your sex. … And soon, we’ll have nothing but the highest and equal standards for men and women in combat.”
https://x.com/SecDef/status/1906677003400442284For far too long, we have allowed standards to slip. We’ve had different standards for men/women serving in combat arms MOS’s and jobs….
— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) March 31, 2025
That’s not acceptable, and it changes right now! pic.twitter.com/Zn9OyBew6G
During Hegseth’s Senate confirmation, he made clear that he’d focus on readiness and lethality by getting rid of the wokeness that infected our warrior ranks during the four years of the Biden administration. In this respect, he’s an immeasurable improvement over his predecessor, Lloyd Austin. But Hegseth also dialed back his insistence that women shouldn’t be in combat roles, instead focusing on the need for objective and equal physical fitness standards.
“Every service member,” he told the Senate Armed Service Committee in January, “regardless of gender, who can meet objective occupational and readiness standards for a career field should have the opportunity to compete for jobs in that field. In those ground combat roles, what is true is that the weight of the ruck on your back doesn’t change. The weight of the 155 round that you have to carry doesn’t change. The weight of the 240 Bravo machine gun you might have to carry doesn’t change. And so, whether it’s a man or a woman, they have to meet the same high standards.”
Who can argue with that? Answer: Those who are more concerned with how our fighting forces look than how they perform. Or, put another way, those who are more concerned with equity than equality.
This directive from Hegseth is thus in keeping with his promise to focus on standards rather than sex. And it’s in keeping with the Trump administration’s continued carpet-bombing of DEI standards across the federal government.
The memo, which orders the military branches to “develop comprehensive plans to distinguish combat arms occupations from non-combat arms occupations,” specifies in hand-underlined text that the soon-to-be-developed standards must not “result in any existing service member being held to a lower standard.”
“All entry-level and sustained physical fitness requirements within combat arms positions must be sex-neutral, based solely on the operational demands of the occupation and the readiness needed to confront any adversary,” wrote Hegseth.
This new standard, then, doesn’t directly attack the women in combat, which Hegseth has long opposed. But make no mistake: It does indirectly address the issue by making it far less likely that women can make the cut. This is a good thing for all involved because when women are placed in combat roles, they not only endanger themselves, but they also endanger their fellow warriors.
What Mike Fredenberg wrote in National Review a decade ago is no less true today: “Putting women into close combat roles isn’t fair to the men who will be relying on them, and isn’t fair to the women who will find themselves continuously at a deadly disadvantage. … While women are equal to or better than men at many tasks, they simply aren’t when it comes to combat. Substituting men with far less combat-capable women is profoundly unfair, immoral, and utterly unnecessary.” How so? Fredenberg unpacks the evidence:
First, physiologically and psychologically, women and men are significantly different. Men are not simply bigger women with different plumbing. Men’s blood carries 10 to 12 percent more oxygen per liter than does a women’s; and men’s VO2 max, a measure of the top rate of oxygen consumption, is 40 to 60 percent greater than that of women. An average fit man will weigh about 23 percent more, have 50 percent more muscle mass, and carry 10 percent less body fat than an average fit woman. Pound for pound, men have thicker skulls, bigger, stronger necks, hearts that are 17 percent larger, and bones that are both bigger and denser. Despite being much heavier, men’s vertical leap is nearly 50 percent greater than that of women.
To our friends who stubbornly believe that men can have babies: This is what we call The Science.
Men and women are different. They always have been. That’s a good thing, a thing worth celebrating. And so is a military standard that moves away from social experimentation and hews tightly to performance.
