Hegseth's Patriarchal Vision Will Make the U.S. Military Less Effective

Yahoo

13-03-2025

In a major and unprecedented shakeup to the U.S. military's leadership, U.S. President Donald Trump removed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Brown in late February, while announcing his intention to replace Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the head of the U.S. Navy. The personnel changes have been framed as part of an effort to eradicate 'woke ideology' from the U.S. military. It is not a coincidence, then, that Brown is Black and Franchetti is the first woman ever to command a U.S. military service branch.
But the Trump administration's attack on efforts to address historical injustices for minorities and women—known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, initiatives—goes beyond purging people of color and high-ranking women officers from the chain of command. As part of this agenda, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has also proposed a radical departure from the U.S. military's approach over the past decade. Though a slow-moving institution that is far from progressive, the Defense Department has undertaken a series of reforms to be more representative of the country it serves. That has included things like adopting a plan to implement the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, updating its harassment policies and protecting its employees from discrimination.
Since taking over as defense secretary in late January, Hegseth has articulated his commitment to 'restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding our military, and reestablishing deterrence.' Along those lines, he announced the creation of a Restoring America's Fighting Force Task Force charged with 'overseeing the Department's efforts to abolish DEI offices and any vestiges of such offices that subvert meritocracy, perpetuate unconstitutional discrimination, and promote radical ideologies related to systemic racism and gender fluidity.' This task force and other envisaged reforms are all aimed at eradicating 'wokeness' from the U.S. military and Defense Department.
This agenda reflects Hegseth's retrograde and patriarchal vision of the U.S. military. But his justifications for all of these measures are often invented or based on false premises. These misrepresentations are aimed at portraying the U.S. military as hamstrung by politically correct overreach. In both his public comments and his highly critical book about the U.S. military, Hegseth has castigated 'woke' generals and policies that, he argues, undermine the military's effectiveness.
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For example, during his Senate confirmation hearings in January, Hegseth cited personal interviews conducted while writing his book to assert that commanders are expected to 'meet quotas' in order to increase the number of women in the ranks. That practice, he added, was one of many 'direct, indirect, overt and subtle' ways that the U.S. military has changed its standards to accommodate women recruits. Hegseth had previously asserted that women should not be present in ground combat operations, stating in November, 'It hasn't made us more effective. Hasn't made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.' Hegseth's statements make it seem as if women have been coddled by the military in order to goose their numbers, to the detriment of readiness.
On both counts, however, he is demonstrably wrong. As Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand pointed out during his confirmation hearing, there are no quotas for women in the infantry. That is a politically expedient lie for Hegseth and his allies. With regard to standards, for instance, retired Army Lt. Col. Ellen Haring told NPR, 'Not only have standards not been lowered, but when they first decided that … they were going to open combat jobs to women, the services were given three years to actually set standards because up until that point in time, standards had been very loosely defined.' In other words, the entry of women into combat roles resulted in standards being formalized, not lowered.
Furthermore, Lory Manning, the director of government operations with the Service Women's Action Network, notes that the U.S. military abides by gender-neutral, position-specific standards. As she explained, 'The National Defense Authorization Act of 1994 established that [for] every occupation in the military … there have to be standards. And there's a separate set of standards for each of those occupations, but they must be gender neutral. And they have been for more than 30 years.'
Hegseth's claim that women's participation in combat roles undermines the U.S. military's ability to achieve its objectives are equally off the mark. In Afghanistan, for example, the military relied on Female Engagement Teams to cultivate relationships with Afghan women who were otherwise off-limits to male troops due to the country's gender norms. As a result, female troops were able to gather mission-critical intelligence and help cultivate a friendlier operating environment for U.S. forces overall.
Hegseth's remarks play well to Trump's base, but they aren't just for public consumption. They have real implications for the well-being of U.S. servicewomen and U.S. women more generally, as well as for women in countries where the U.S. military is active. U.S. servicewomen are now likely to face even more skepticism about whether they belong in the military, particularly when they are involved in combat operations. Already, women in the military have to grapple with gender-specific challenges, like the threat of sexual harassment and assault at work. In 2023, nearly 7 percent of active-duty servicewomen experienced 'unwanted sexual contact' at work compared with just 1.3 percent of servicemen. Making it harder to be a woman in the U.S. military isn't about meritocracy—it's about enforcing traditional gender roles in which men are celebrated as masculine protectors and women are confined to being grateful and vulnerable beneficiaries of that protection.
Furthermore, revamping the U.S. military to be an organization of 'door-kickers' could mean a broader militarization of U.S. culture. As noted feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe has argued, societal militarization often comes at the expense of women's well-being, as it not only empowers a narrow class of men, but also 'diverts scarce public resources to military operations and manufacturing' at the cost of 'the very things that women depend on – which are education, environment and social security.' The United States' already paltry investment in these sectors could be threatened by a cultural shift toward an aggressive military whose culture is imbued with toxic masculinity.
Finally, Hegseth's worldview has troubling implications for the safety of women in the areas where the U.S. military operates. Hegseth has been up front about his frustration over the Pentagon's interpretation of the laws of armed conflict, and he has advocated for loosening those restrictions. As a Fox News personality during Trump's first term, he publicly lobbied Trump to pardon several U.S. military officers who had been accused and even convicted of war crimes by U.S. courts martial, resulting in several of them escaping accountability.
But in addition to undermining the rules-based order that the U.S. has championed since the end of World War II as well as being counterproductive in any war in which public support matters, loosening the U.S. military's adherence to the laws of war would increase the vulnerabilities faced by women living in active conflict zones. For example, both International Humanitarian Law and international criminal law both prohibit the use of sexual violence in the course of war. For the U.S. military to thumb its nose at the idea of restraint in the conduct of war could give rise to a culture of acceptance of and impunity for such violations.
Hegseth's advocacy on behalf of war criminals and his public bristling against restrictions on the military's use of violence spell out a future in which not just women, but all civilians in war zones are afforded few protections and little recourse when they are abused. His approach will undo the uneven and imperfect but nevertheless real progress the U.S. military made over the past decade on women's role in the armed forces and the value of avoiding civilian harm in conflict zones. The military culture Hegseth is advocating for is one of unmitigated aggression and impunity. He claims to want to increase the military's 'lethality' and 'readiness,' but instead he will kneecap its reputation and professionalism.
Hilary Matfess is an assistant professor at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She is also a Council on Foreign Relations term fellow, a research fellow at the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab and a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies' (CSIS) Africa Program. 'In Love and at War' is her second book.
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