Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, faced hours of questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee. When asked about his previous statements that women should not serve in combat roles, Hegseth repeatedly said he was not disrespecting women. Instead, he said, he was criticizing the military’s lowering of standards to allow women into combat roles and the existence of gender-based quotas. 

“I have never disparaged women serving in the military,” Hegseth said during the hearing when addressing Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. “I respect every single female service member that has put on the uniform, past and present. My critiques, Senator, recently and in the past, and from personal experience, have been instances where I’ve seen standards lowered.” 

Hegseth said while writing his book, “The War on Warriors,” he interviewed men and women active-duty service members who told him that in “direct, indirect, overt and subtle” ways, “standards have been changed inside infantry training units, Ranger School, infantry battalions.”

Gillibrand interjected: “Give me one example.” 

“Commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted,” Hegseth responded. “And that disparages those women who are incredibly capable of meeting that standard.” 

Gillibrand stopped him again, holding a printed copy of the current military standards required for every man and woman serving in the infantry. 

“Commanders do not have to meet quotas for women in the infantry,” Gillibrand said. “That does not exist. And your statements are creating the impression that these exist. They do not.” 

Hegseth’s statements resurfaced an old line of argument about an evolving military. The 19th spoke to Lory Manning, a Navy veteran who served for 25 years before becoming the director of government operations with the Service Women’s Action Network, about how the military has changed as it has admitted women into more jobs. Manning also led Women in the Military Project at the Women’s Research and Education Institute for 15 years, where she regularly oversaw studies on women in the military. 

Have military requirements for combat roles ever been lowered for women? 

No. It is against the law to lower standards for women when compared with men in the same role.

Women — who make up more than 21 percent of the active-duty force — have held combat roles for decades, although it’s been a gradual progression. Congress repealed the law banning women from combat aviation and on ships in 1991 and 1993, respectively. The Navy reversed the policy barring women from submarines specifically in 2010. And then in 2013, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the end of the direct ground combat exclusion rule for women — as part of a plan to make sure all military occupational performance standards were gender-neutral by 2016. In 2016, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter brought that plan to fruition, opening about nearly 220,000 positions to women and ensuring qualified women could access every military position “with no barriers at all.” 

Manning said she was active-duty when women were first allowed on planes and ships in a combat capacity, and even then people made inaccurate comments about standards being lowered.

“That is absolutely false,” Manning said. “They were never lowered. The National Defense Authorization Act of 1994 established that every occupation in the military — from medics to Catholic priests to people in combat — 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.”

According to the 1994 law, “any military occupational career field that is open to both male and female members of the Armed Forces” should be “evaluated on the basis of common, relevant performance standards, without differential standards of revaluation on the basis of gender.” 

Manning said it is possible that Hegseth is conflating different kinds of military standards: basic physical fitness tests and occupational standards. The basic physical fitness tests differ across military services and are typically adjusted by age and gender. The Army’s fitness test has been revised many times in recent years.

“The Army combat fitness test was first designed by testing a bunch of under 24-year-old men who were mostly from the infantry and they normed it to apply to everybody in the military and the Guard and Reserves,” Manning said. “They found that almost nobody could pass it who wasn’t in the infantry. And the medical community — the doctors, the nurses, the dentists — complained to Congress that they were asking them to do ridiculous things like trek 19 miles with a 75-pound pack on his or her back. You need one who knows how to pull a tooth.” 

The occupational standards also shift over time. 

“There was a time 10 years ago when nobody knew how to fly a drone,” Manning said. “So the standards change, but they’re not based on sex. They’re based on military need.” 

Is there a quota for women in the military academies or in the infantry?

No. According to the National Defense Authorization Act of 1994, any military role open to both men and women “may not use gender quota, goal or ceiling” and “may not change an occupational performance standard for the purpose of increasing or decreasing the number of women in that occupational career field.” 

“If there were quotas, there’d be women in the Navy SEALs,” Manning said. “There aren’t any because they can’t pass tests.” 

Manning said there actually were once limits on how many women would be allowed in certain roles. Women could only constitute 2 percent or less of the force before 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson signed a law removing the restriction. Before then, only one woman in each service was allowed to hold certain high ranks. Still, it would be another five years until women could command units that included men. 

 Is there any evidence that the military’s effectiveness has declined as a result of women being allowed into combat roles? 

No. Manning said she hasn’t seen any articles, research or substantial evidence that our military is “softer” than before.

“We’re not winning battles like we used to, but that’s not the kind of wars we’re fighting anymore,” Manning said. “A lot of the stuff now involves missiles, which is just a whole other way of fighting.” 

The increase in women soldiers and the visibility of their services has been integral to the military’s mission in modern warfare. For example, in Iraq, women specialty combat squads called Lioness Teams were able to obtain key intelligence and gain access to areas their male counterparts could not. These women Marines and soldiers were encouraged to emphasize their femininity by taking off their helmets, letting their hair down and relating to Iraqi women on a more personal level that would have been culturally objectionable if a man had been sent to interview them instead. 

Manning said the idea that the military now is weaker than the one before is a common perception from older veterans — a trend that can be traced back even to the Civil War. 

“There was a study that found that a lot of the people that fought in the Civil War were still alive during the start of World War I — and they complained that the military was too soft to send soldiers,” Manning said. “The same thing happened again with World War II with World War I vets saying the military had gone soft. It’s just one of those things in that particular profession, the idea that ‘we had it so hard.’”