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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week that he wants to get rid of a program designed to promote the contributions and safety of women in global conflict zones. The Women, Peace and Security program was signed into law by President Trump in 2017 and co-sponsored by two members of Trump's current cabinet. It also passed with bipartisan support. In a post on X, Hegseth initially called the program a woke, Biden-era initiative. He later clarified those comments, saying that its original mission became distorted under the Biden administration.
So why does Hegseth now want to eliminate the program, and what might be the implications if it goes away? Kathleen McInnis is a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She's been a staunch defender of the program and its impact on women in the military. My colleague Juana Summers spoke with her this week.
JUANA SUMMERS, BYLINE: I just want to understand on a practical level what this might have looked like across the U.S. military services. Or I wonder if you can give us a couple of examples as to how the goals of women, peace and security were implemented.
KATHLEEN MCINNIS: Sure. It's things like making sure that body armor can fit women service members. Now, it's a very - it seems like a very simple thing that, you know, when you are sending your forces forward, you want to make sure that they have the best equipment that they can possibly have so they can fight and win our wars. When you put men's body armor on a women's - woman's body, there's actually spaces where shrapnel can hit women's sides. And so getting those kinds of considerations into the overall Department of Defense system - that was one of the tasks that the Women, Peace and Security agenda was trying to accomplish, making sure that our women warfighters were capable of fighting and winning wars.
SUMMERS: I'll note here that, though Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he is moving away from this program, this initiative is something that's enshrined into law. The defense secretary does not have the ability to either rewrite laws or to overturn them. But what does it mean that he is now signaling the - a move away by the Defense Department, a lack of investment, a lack of agreement with this policy?
MCINNIS: What he is signaling and he's intending to do is take what is required by law and do essentially only the bare minimum consistent with statute and make sure that the executive branch is compliant. So there's a bunch of things that have been happening under the Women, Peace and Security agenda that have been improving the operational effectiveness of the force but weren't necessarily matched against the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 itself. My understanding is that he's also asking for legislative relief down the line to argue that the Department of Defense should no longer implement the Women, Peace and Security Act at all.
SUMMERS: A number of Republicans have vocally championed the Women, Peace and Security initiative as an example of President Trump's successes, particularly when it comes to women's issues. Here is Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking at the International Women of Courage awards ceremony. This was just last month.
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MARCO RUBIO: President Trump also signed the Women, Peace and Security Act, a bill that I was very proud to have been a co-sponsor of when I was in the Senate. And it was the first comprehensive law passed in any country in the world - first law passed by any country anywhere in the world - focused on protecting women and promoting their participation in society.
SUMMERS: Kathleen McInnis, what's changed?
MCINNIS: There's concerns that the agenda has been implemented in a manner that is consistent with what people would call a DEI or woke agenda, that it has overly tokenized women in the armed forces, it's created burdensome training requirements, and it's just been kind of a pain in implementation and therefore degradating (ph) the effectiveness of the military. Seventeen-point-seven percent of active duty troops right now are women, and 21.9% of reserve service members are women. So that's about 20% of the military force that need things like body armor and access to reproductive health systems. Making sure that the Pentagon thinks through the unique requirements of the women service members, which are increasingly part of the force.
SUMMERS: Big picture - we have heard Defense Secretary Hegseth say that he wants women to have diminished roles in combat, and I know that you follow this area closely. His tenure is still in the early days, but what are you thinking as it gets started?
MCINNIS: I don't understand the rhetoric because I don't understand how it comports with war. When we've thought about Iraq and Afghanistan, when you look at Ukraine, we're - the distinction between combat and noncombat is very blurry. It's very porous. The very character of war is changing. So there's strategic advantage that you can build into your force by integrating women effectively.
SUMMERS: That's Kathleen McInnis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you so much.
MCINNIS: Oh, thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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