This story was originally reported by Mariel Padilla of The 19th. Meet Mariel and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
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Shortly after she graduated from Princeton University, Mikayla Blaska was selected by a unit commander to attend Ranger School, one of the toughest training courses in the Army. For two months, she endured sleep deprivation, extreme calorie restriction and high-intensity patrolling while carrying over 100 pounds in both mountainous and swamp terrains. As she led an exercise in her final phase of the course, Blaska noticed a man on her team was refusing to listen to her directives. When she confronted him, he responded that he could not respect a woman. He saw her only as a sexual object, he said.
“I think that might be the worst thing that was said to me through the course of my career,” Blaska said. “And this is somebody who I’m sharing a foxhole with, someone I’m sleeping next to at night.”
Blaska, now 28, knew she shouldn’t angrily tell him off. So she pointed to why his lack of respect would hurt the other men they were with.
“I told him that I respected his honesty and that whether he liked it or not, I was going to be there with him,” Blaska said. “And at the end of the day, if he wants to screw me over, that’s fine, but it was about our other team members. I think that argument persuaded him to finally start listening.”
By the end of the 61-day training course, he admitted he was impressed that she could carry so much “as a woman” and even ranked her the top performer of their team.
The requirements for both Blaska and the man to graduate were exactly the same. He failed. She didn’t. Blaska never saw him again.
Recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for a six-month review of women in combat, according to a memo that Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel Anthony Tata wrote in December 2025 — first reported by NPR in January. The goal is to assess the “operational effectiveness of ground combat units 10 years after the Department lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles.”
Defense Department press secretary Kingsley Wilson responded to requests for more information by saying the ultimate goal is to “ensure the United States maintains the most lethal military.”
“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. Under Secretary Hegseth, the Department of War will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda — this is common sense,” Wilson said in a statement.
Quotas and different standards are already illegal, and past reviews have actually shown benefits to women being fully integrated into combat roles. But Hegseth continues to imply that the military has valued inclusion over efficacy — even though the requirements for women and men in combat roles are identical.
Hegseth, a former Fox News host who served in the Army National Guard, has made disparaging comments about women. In a podcast interview in 2024, he said, “I’m straight up just saying we shouldn’t have women in combat roles.” In his book, “The War on Warriors,” he argued that women have made the military less effective, less lethal and “fighting more complicated.” And in August 2025, Hegseth reposted a video of an evangelical Christian pastor questioning women’s right to vote.
Women currently make up more than 21 percent of the active-duty force and have held combat roles in the military for decades, though it’s been a gradual progression. The last roles were finally opened to women in 2015 after Congress repealed the combat exclusion policy two years prior. In the last decade, more than 5,000 women have served in combat arms, and 174 women have earned Ranger tabs alongside almost 15,000 men with the same standards.
According to an assessment from the Women in the Service Coalition, Army data showed that brigade combat teams with women performed at the same level of training proficiencies as teams without women. In fact, crime trends were higher in teams without women. And several studies have shown that men who serve alongside women are more likely to support a fully gender-integrated military.
Kris Fuhr, the author of the assessment and the first woman to command a ground-based intelligence company in Europe, said the Pentagon’s review is yet another “search for a problem that does not exist.”
“They’re doing this now because it is no secret that Secretary Hegseth has a strong desire to marginalize women in the military,” said Fuhr, who worked for two years at the United States Army Forces Command as an expert on gender integration. “He carries his religious views into his professional duties, and his religious views are that women do not lead and men do not submit to women.”
Hegseth served as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard, but did not complete Ranger School, Airborne School or Air Assault School. The 19th spoke to four women Army veterans who completed at least one of those elite trainings and were commissioned in an era when qualified women soldiers could serve in any capacity. They talked about their experiences on the front line and their thoughts on the future of the military’s effectiveness under Hegseth’s leadership.
Mikayla Blaska, 28
Graduated from Airborne School and was the 56th woman to complete Ranger School
In September 2021, Blaska was deployed to Syria, the only woman in infantry there at the time. As an officer, she led 43 soldiers — all men — and partner force service members, a linguist and a few other personnel.
Over the next nine months, Blaska said she led her platoon on over 120 combat patrols with zero casualties.
“People think of combat deployments as something from World War I or World War II, which can absolutely still happen and we definitely need to be prepared for that, but the majority of what I was doing in Syria was a lot of key leader engagements and intelligence collection,” Blaska said.
In fact, Blaska said her being a woman helped the mission. Because of cultural differences, many Syrian women and important community figures would not speak to men and felt more comfortable speaking to her.
Blaska said she is not opposed to assessing and reassessing military standards. She agrees that the U.S. military should strive to be the best, most prepared and most qualified in the world. But, Blaska said, any legitimate review should include age, time in service, education levels, upbringings and life experiences — in addition to gender.
“I hope we don’t reverse and start going backwards,” Blaska said. “This is the kind of thing that can be incredibly detrimental to the culture within the military, and it’s not grounded in any sort of factual basis. It’s clearly stemming from some sort of emotional bias against women.”
Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs, 29
Graduated from Airborne School
When 29-year-old veteran Elizabeth Dempsey Beggs heard the Pentagon was going to review the effectiveness of the military with women in combat roles, she initially felt “sorrow and fear” for her friends who are still active-duty and serving in these roles. Then, she felt anger but not surprise — she knew that Hegseth had criticized women’s participation in the military.
“We’ve done the studies, and we have the data,” said Dempsey Beggs, who is currently running for Congress as a Democrat in Virginia’s 1st District. “He could take that time, energy, money, effort and actually make the lives of service members better, but he’s choosing to go down a witch hunt because women have done what he can’t.”
Dempsey Beggs completed Airborne School and was one of the first 50 women to serve in combat roles after Congress lifted the ban in 2015 — and the first from Kentucky. She was an acting company commander at Fort Benning in Georgia during the COVID-19 pandemic. She and her husband, also a company commander at the time, had two daughters.
One morning, Dempsey Beggs had to leave at 4 a.m. to lead a training event. Her husband was supposed to watch their 6-month-old but unexpectedly had to take an injured service member out of state at 3:30 a.m. Dempsey Beggs — who was pregnant with her second daughter — strapped her baby on her chest and put her rucksack on her back and hiked five miles.
“I just kept doing my job,” Dempsey Beggs said.
She sees the review as designed to push active-duty women to leave the armed forces and not try for combat roles.
“These combat roles already have physical fitness standards that are gender neutral,” Dempsey Beggs said. “Women and men fail them. No one is arguing that every single woman should be able to fill these roles, just like we never want every single man to be able to fill these roles. Everyone who is qualified and who is willing to serve is who we want in these roles.”
Hailey Gibbons, 34
Graduated from Airborne School, Air Assault School and was the 102nd woman to complete Ranger School
Hailey Gibbons is disappointed in Hegseth’s leadership priorities. The 34-year-old graduated from West Point, Ranger School, Airborne School and Air Assault School before serving as a logistics officer for 10 years and becoming the seventh woman to ever serve in the 75th Ranger Regiment, one of the most elite Army infantry regiments. Though she didn’t technically serve in a combat role, Gibbons met the same standards as a combat soldier.
“This is just blatant sexism,” Gibbons said of the Pentagon’s review. “It’s pretty upsetting that people in leadership positions are adjusting everything they’re doing just to help the sexist agenda of people in certain positions. Women have shown that they’re effective leaders in the military and in combat situations.”
Gibbons said throughout her training, she never faced discouragement from peers or leadership because of her gender.
“No one ever said that I couldn’t be able to do it because I had proven that I was physically fit and technically capable enough to be successful at each stage,” Gibbons said. “All of those opinions come from people who inherently hate women or haven’t really served alongside women, who haven’t been in Tier 1 units, who haven’t deployed — because everyone that I served with didn’t hold those opinions.”
Gibbons said she was the 102nd woman to ever graduate from Ranger School, and the only time her gender came up as an issue was when she needed to go to a separate location to shower. For every mission and task, she said she was held to the same standards as the men.
Gibbons doesn’t think women will be dissuaded from serving by Hegseth’s efforts — but she does worry about the effect on culture.
“Repeating the lie that women can’t meet standards creates an environment that could lead to a toxic team environment, which is really disappointing because leaders have worked so hard to make women feel welcome,” Gibbons said.
Sara Febbo, 30
Graduated from Airborne School and was the 65th woman to complete Ranger School
Sara Febbo grew up the daughter of a commissioned military attorney, and her childhood included a stint at an Army base in Vicenza, Italy. Fourteen years later, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent back to Vicenza as the first woman to serve as a medical service officer in the unit. She was a platoon leader in charge of 50 combat medics and medic specialists.
Febbo, now 30, said she wasn’t technically in a combat role but her job responsibilities included being attached to infantry units, Airborne Rangers and Special Forces. She was required to do all the same training and reach all the same standards.
“The standard was there and the leaders were holding you to that standard because they couldn’t afford not to,” Febbo said. “There’s too many things on the line. Mission comes first, and you could be a liability. But that definitely was not the case for me, nor for any of the other women that I know that served in those units.”
As she continued to meet and exceed the standards, Febbo said her superiors took notice. One reached out and said he wanted to bring her to the 75th Ranger Regiment and asked if she could meet the standards — which are even tougher than those of Ranger School. The mandatory intensive eight-week selection process included doing 41 push-ups in two minutes, holding a plank for two minutes and 35 seconds, running five miles in 40 minutes and doing six pull-ups.
“I could barely do one pull-up, but this boss believed in me,” said Febbo, who is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed around 120 pounds at the time. “I started training with my peers. I set my mind to it, and to make a long story short, I eventually physically met the standards.”
Febbo passed the selection process in October 2020 and became the second woman ever to be directly within an infantry battalion in the 75th Ranger Regiment.
Four months later, she went to Ranger School and earned her Ranger tab.
“It’s crazy to me that we’re even having this conversation,” Febbo said. “By the time I went through Ranger School, I was the 65th woman to graduate. It wasn’t a new concept having women in Ranger School, but I absolutely commend the women that went first because they had a very tough road trying to prove their worth over and over again.”