Pentagon reviewing effectiveness of women in combat roles more than a decade after integration
Hegseth has expressed skepticism about women's inclusion in some combat units.
Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs chose one of the Army's most demanding paths where officers command tanks, a field known for relentless tactical complexity and one that demands a mastery of some of the military's heaviest weapons.
Commissioned through the Army's Reserve Officers' Training Corps, she graduated in 2018 and entered a field that had only recently opened to women. She was among the first, and soon found herself leading soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas.
"Tanks are really cool," Beggs, who's running for Congress as a Democrat in Virginia, said in an interview with ABC News.
What drew her to the job, she explained, was the time in the field and that she wanted to fight if needed.
"I knew I wanted to be on the ground," she said. Her father was an armor officer in the Marine Corps.
Women were formally integrated into ground combat units in 2015, but now, more than a decade later, the Pentagon has recently started a review of the performance of thousands of women serving in ground combat units -- a step that comes amid Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's long-expressed skepticism about their inclusion in such units.
Over the next six months, the review will examine the performance and training outcomes of ground combat units, according to an internal Pentagon memo reviewed by ABC News. Dated Dec. 18, the memo says the findings are expected to inform decisions about how those units are staffed and how their training is designed.
"Our standards for combat arms positions will be elite, uniform, and sex neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn't care if you're a man or a woman," Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement.
The review comes after years of debate over women's place in the armed forces. About 4,500 women now serve in ground combat positions across the Army and Marine Corps, including in infantry, armor and artillery units -- as well as roughly 10 in the Army's Special Forces.
Some of the services and outside groups have studied the integration of women into combat roles and other male-dominated fields in recent years and have found no degradation to unit performance. A Marine Corps study, however, did find women are more likely to suffer from injuries.
Beggs said there was skepticism in the ranks when she entered a job field that had been exclusively male. Some questioned how she would take part in hand-to-hand combat training, which involves grappling and close physical contact, or how she would manage basic needs, such as using the bathroom while in the field.
"I went in with the attitude that this is new," she said. "I wanted to make it an open space and answer questions without judging anyone."
Over time, she added, that unease faded.
"Once they served with women themselves, that negativity and skepticism was gone," she said of her fellow soldiers.
Hegseth has loosely moderated his once categorical opposition to women serving in ground combat roles after years of arguing that women should be excluded from front-line units.
In a September address to troops, he framed the issue in terms of standards rather than gender. Positions that demand physical strength in combat, he said, should be governed by rigorous, gender-neutral requirements.
"If women can make it, excellent," he said at the time. "If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it."
That position stands in stark contrast to remarks Hegseth made before taking office -- comments that were widely viewed as openly hostile to the idea of women serving in combat roles.
"Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes," he wrote in his 2024 book "War on Warriors."
"We need moms," he added. "But not in the military, especially in combat units."
The review also follows a period of profound change for the military. Two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq blurred the traditional boundaries of the battlefield, routinely placing women in combat conditions even before formal restrictions were lifted. In those conflicts, as in earlier wars, women served under fire and were recognized for acts of combat valor.
Christine Wormuth, who served as Army secretary during the Biden administration, said that during her tenure, the integration of women into combat roles gained momentum without significant disruption. She said no concerns about the process rose to her level at the Pentagon, suggesting it was proceeding largely without incident.
"It was going well," Wormuth said. "It was frankly not a topic of a lot of conversation. It was not a big issue."
The move also follows the Army's implementation of gender-neutral standards for combat jobs on Jan. 1. The service has long sought to adopt such standards, but the effort was repeatedly delayed amid broader overhauls of fitness requirements and ongoing debates over how soldiers should be evaluated and how physical demands should be measured across occupations.
Pentagon officials are also revamping how service members' body fat is to be measured and what's considered acceptable, according to internal documentation reviewed by ABC News.
Women were also widely seen as critical in the post-9/11 wars in special operations units, particularly in rural Afghanistan, where cultural norms generally forbid women from interacting with men outside of their family.
"We're 10 years down the road, most men in combat arms have served with women in combat arms and they know they meet the standard," Kris Fuhr, a former Army official who was key in overseeing gender integration into Army combat units, told ABC News. "They just want someone competent to their left and right. This is his attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist."
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