Combat roles have been open to women for a decade, but President Donald Trump's Pentagon still questions whether women can be lethal. Army veteran Emelie Vanasse says the debate over women's battlefield fitness is long settled. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin with help from Denise Guerra, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd and hosted by Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Army veteran Emilie Vanass outside Army Ranger School at Camp Rogers in Fort Benning, GA. Image courtesy Emilie Vanass. Help us plan for the future of Today, Explained by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the debate about women in combat roles?
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came into his job promising a war on wokeness and weakness in the U.S. military.
No more pronouns. No more climate change obsession. No more emergency vaccine mandates. No more dudes in dresses. We're done with that shit.
Hegseth has taken aim at women. He's challenged the idea that women should serve in combat roles, as they have for 10 years now. He's danced around whether women make the military less lethal, including at his Senate confirmation hearing.
Commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted, and that disparages those women who are incredibly capable of meeting that standard.
Next month, he's updating the Army fitness test to make it more difficult and to make the standards the same for men and women. Coming up on Today Explained, the war over women warfighters.
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Chapter 2: What are the new physical fitness standards for the military?
That's the test that the Army has been taking. There's going to be some changes to how that's scored. In general, the standards are going up just a little bit across the board. People are going to have to do more push-ups. There are some changes in some places to the timing of the run.
But the big change really is for women who want to go into combat arms specialties or who are already in combat arms specialties. They're going to have to meet basically the male standard.
Okay, if I'm a literal-minded person, I might say, you know, it makes sense to me that women should have to meet the same standards as men, especially, maybe even only, if they weren't doing their jobs as well as men. So we now have some years of data on this. In those combat jobs, did we have evidence that women were not doing them as well as men, not doing them well enough?
There really hasn't been evidence yet.
There are sort of two things I think are important to consider. One is that the Army and the military branches sort of look at or make a distinction between fitness standards and occupational standards. So while the physical fitness test for the Army, the Army combat fitness test, has been consistent, gender-normed and age-normed.
Every woman who serves in a combat role has had to meet occupational standards, so basically these physical demands that the job requires, tasks that test how well you can really do the physical parts of the job. And that's gender-neutral. They're graded the same for everyone. The debate over women in combat didn't come out of a vacuum. It came out of Iraq and Afghanistan, where women were...
doing the job alongside men in a lot of cases.
I basically got an email that was kind of mysterious and was like, can you meet these physical requirements? Do you want to deploy with a special operations unit? And I said, yes. You know, you deployed to Afghanistan and you're attached to a special operations unit. So I was attached to Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha.
There were lioness teams, these female engagement teams that, because of cultural reasons, would be involved in raiding and clearing houses, engaging with women. And they were exposed to a lot of the same combat threats that men were.
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Chapter 3: How has women's participation in combat roles evolved?
Yeah. Kind of more concretely, the Pentagon and the military branches have eliminated barrier analysis groups, which was really an Air Force initiative that the other services were starting to emulate that worked on issues for women and various minority groups, saying basically, how can we remove barriers to their service? How can we make them safe? them better? How can we make them more lethal?
How can we help them do their jobs better? And how do we develop body armor that fits women's bodies? Because that's been a big problem is that small body armor, which is issued often to women, is designed for a small male body. The bottom was so heavy and didn't fit, it would clank up against my hips and it would cause bruises on my ribs.
And then the Pentagon basically removed all of the members of some 40-plus defense advisory committees. There are these basically independent committees that advise the Secretary of Defense on everything from R&D to how the military handles sexual assault.
Is there any sense that Secretary of Defense Hegseth is overstepping and some of this may be relitigated later on?
I think there's a chance that it will be sort of reconsidered later on. But a lot of this really, for the most part, is the secretary's prerogative. He can stand up or dismantle these committees. He has a lot of decision-making authority.
He can direct the military branches to do X, Y, Z. I think a lot of the concerns people are having now is that these big questions, like women in combat, are going to be addressed without sort of the independent study and counsel that have historically accompanied big decisions in the military.
Pete Hegseth is an unusual choice for Secretary of Defense. He has, in some ways, I think it's fair to say, targeted women in the service. What do you hear from your sources, from your women's sources in the military about what they think of him and how they're feeling about all these proposed changes?
Hegseth and military leadership are focusing on sort of small culture wars questions rather than some of the big questions that are facing the military.
And I think, you know, one thing that I've heard is that Hegseth talks a lot about lethality and the importance of lethality and that sort of woke, quote unquote, woke culture in the military is undermining lethality, but they haven't really seen a definition of what lethality is. I think a lot of people in the military would like to get a clearer understanding of how he defines lethality.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do women in the military face?
Sonner Kurtz, she's an investigative reporter at The War Horse, which is a national nonprofit newsroom that covers the military and veterans. Find them at thewarhorse.org. Coming up, a lady veteran who did something that Secretary of Defense Hegseth couldn't.
When comedian Chris Gethard was growing up, he went to a place called Action Park. It was one of the first water parks in the country. And it was built by a man who had no experience building theme parks. Some people called him a berserk Willy Wonka.
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Chapter 5: What is Pete Hegseth's stance on women in combat?
But I very much considered it a prerequisite for my job as an infantry officer. I was also very aware that there was kind of half of this population of objective graders that just kind of hated my guts for even showing up.
They hated you for showing up because you're a woman?
Back in 2016 and 2017, it was so new to have women in ranger school. I used to think, like, I don't have to just be good. Like, I have to be lucky. I have to get a grader who is willing to let a woman pass. I had dark times at that school. I tasted real failure. I sat under a poncho in torrential rain, and I shivered so hard, my whole body cramped.
I put on a ruck that weighed 130 pounds, and I crawled up a mountain on my hands and knees. I hallucinated a donut shop in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains and I cried one morning when someone told me I had to get out of my sleeping bag. But I think all of those experiences are such like quintessential ranger school experiences. They're what everyone kind of goes through there.
The point of the school is that failure, that suffering. It's not inherently bad, right? In a way, I like to think like ranger school was the most simplistic form. of gender integration that ever could have happened because if I was contributing to the team, there was no individual out there that really had the luxury of disliking or excluding me.
Did you only cry that one time?
I think it was just once at ranger school. Yeah. Damn. It was a cold morning and I just really didn't want to get out of my... It had been like 10 minutes of sleep and I was like, no, please, 10 more minutes. But you did it. You just did it. And then you kept going. Well, you just did it.
Most of us didn't. OK, so when you wanted to give up, I'm going on a tangent here just because I find this fascinating. I'm so sorry. I'm of the age where like I was like 13 when G.I. Jane came out. So I just think this is so badass. When you wanted to give up. Why didn't you? Like, what did you tell yourself? Was it like, I'm a woman and I must prove a point?
Or was it like, fuck no, I, Emily, am certainly not going to pull out of something that I want? Like, what was going through your head?
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Chapter 6: How is the Pentagon addressing the question of women in combat?
Let me ask you a question about six pull-ups. Were there any men who you were physically superior to? Like in ranger school, were there any men who could only do five pull-ups? Or was it basically like, look, women have different... Women have different levels of strength, upper body strength. And so six is good, but that's sort of the low point.
No, not at all. It's six pull-ups or you don't get to do ranger school. You get dropped on the first day. So everybody does six pull-ups.
So in ranger school, there's only one standard for the fitness test. Everybody's got to meet it. Correct. And that allows you to get out of ranger school and say, look... Fellas, I took the same test as the men and I passed. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is saying that Army combat jobs should only have one standard of fitness for both men and women.
And there's part of me that thinks, doesn't that allow the women who meet the standards to be like, look, we met the same standards as the men? Nothing suspicious here, guys.
I think gender neutral standards for combat arms is very important. Like, it should not be discounted how important physical fitness is for combat arms. I think there's nuance in determining, like, what is a standard that is useful for combat arms, right? Um... But I think it's an important thing.
And there have honestly been gender neutral standards for combat arms in things like infantry basic officer leadership course, which is kind of the initial kind of basic training for officers going into the infantry. There are gender neutral standards that you have to meet. You have to run five miles in 40 minutes. You have to do a 12 mile rock. Like all of those standards have remained the same.
Pete Hegseth is specifically referring to the Army Combat Physical Fitness Test. And to a certain extent, I agree, it should be gender neutral for combat arms. But I think there's nuance in determining what exactly does combat arms entail physically.
Secretary Hegseth has a lot to say about women, and sometimes he says it directly and sometimes he alludes to it. What he often does is he talks about lethality as something that is critically important for the military. He says the Army in particular needs more of it, but he never really defines what he means by lethality. What is the definition as you understand it?
There's a component of lethality that is physical fitness, and it should not be discounted. But lethality extends far beyond that, right? It's tactical skills. It's decision-making. It's leadership. It's grit. It's the ability to build trust and instill purpose in a group of people. It's how quick a fire team in my platoon can react to contact.
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Chapter 7: What impacts do changes in military standards have on women?
And it goes like, I stand on the sacrifices of a million women before me thinking, what can I do to make this mountain taller so the women after me can see further? It's exhausting to have this conversation again, but at least I get to relive the accomplishments of some incredible women that have added so much to that mountain.
Do you think that if Secretary Hegseth could take a look at what you did in ranger school and he could hear from you that there were no second chances, there were no excuses, there was no babying, the men didn't treat me nicer just because I was a woman, do you think that he'd change his mind about women serving in combat?
I'd like to think he would, but I've met plenty of people whose mind couldn't be changed by reality. I'd love if he went to ranger school. He has a lot of opinions about ranger school for someone who's never been. He may have gone and failed, I'm actually not quite sure, but he does not have his ranger tab.
What is a ranger tab for civilians?
A ranger tab is what you receive upon graduating ranger school, which means you have passed all three phases and you are now ranger qualified in the military.
Uh-huh. So you have that and the Secretary of Defense doesn't. He does not, though he has a lot of opinions about ranger school. So Emily Van Ness, she has since left the military and today she works for a defense technology company. That song you're hearing is This Will Defend by the Army Rappers. They're part of the U.S. military.
Today's episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain with an assist from Denise Guerra. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
Everyone's here for a purpose. I'm here representing mine. Took my passion to the armed forces. Me already gon' shine. United States, divine to grace. Not here to waste no time. No final place, the rise of grace. This will defend or die. Let's just be honest. This country's amazing. I cannot deny.
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