A series of recent Department of Defense decisions could make it harder for women to serve in combat roles.

By Sonner Kehrt, The War Horse​ for The 19th​

A series of recent Department of Defense decisions could make it harder for women to serve in combat roles.

In Army Ranger school, Emelie Vanasse once sat in a dugout covered by a poncho as rain poured down, shivering so hard her whole body cramped up. She strapped on a rucksack that weighed over 100 pounds and climbed a mountain. Deep in the middle of the woods, she hallucinated a donut shop.

When Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to complete Ranger training in 2015, Vanasse had taped their pictures above her desk.

“I’m next,” she used to tell herself. “It’s going to be me.”

Less than two years later, she woke up at 3 a.m., shaved her head — one-quarter inch all around — and drove to Camp Rogers, Georgia, to endure 62 days crawling through mud, rappelling down mountainsides and leading fellow soldiers in training raids and ambushes while hungry and sleep-deprived. She graduated with another woman as the fourth and fifth female Rangers in the Army’s 249-year history.

Today, 160 women have earned their Ranger tabs, and the debate over whether women should serve in combat positions alongside men is generally considered settled.

Or it had been, until very recently.

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to reexamine the physical fitness standards and how they have changed since January 2015. The month before that, he fired the former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti without giving a reason, leaving the military without a single female four-star officer. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman fired the only other four-star woman, former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan, on Inauguration Day.

Hegseth’s mission to return the Pentagon’s focus to a “warrior ethos” has seen the elimination of groups that worked to remove unequal barriers to service and the erasure of women and other minority groups’ accomplishments from Defense Department websites.

And on Thursday, the secretary took the unusual step of removing all current members of the Pentagon’s independent advisory committees — including the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service, one of the oldest, known by its acronym, DACOWITS. The committee has been a standard-bearer for women’s integration into the military, advising secretaries of both parties on every issue surrounding women in the military dating back to the Truman administration. For decades, it advocated to allow women to serve in combat roles.

Advocates for women in the military worry the move signals Hegseth may be looking to appoint committee members who agree with him — in the past, he has been vocal that women are not suited to serve in combat.

“We’ve been in combat. We’ve been in combat since Deborah Sampson and the Revolutionary War,” said Octavia Harris, a retired Navy command master chief who served on the committee until last week. “By virtue of just being a woman in the military, you know you’re going to have to prove yourself time and time again.”

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It’s now been a decade since the military opened combat roles to women, and thousands of women have served in those positions. Women make up nearly 20 percent of the total military, and surveys of active duty troops have shown that men who serve alongside women tend to support a fully gender-integrated military. Even the Marine Corps — which long pushed back against integrating its recruit training — has begun graduating mixed-gender battalions.

Even as questions swirl around Hegseth’s future, people who have been involved in women’s integration in the military worry that reopening this debate means the Pentagon may look for more ways to limit women’s ability to serve in an equal capacity to men — and could kneecap its ability to recruit its next generation of soldiers, sailors and airmen.

“What if those people happen to be some of the best and brightest and most innovative and lethal warriors for tomorrow’s generation of servants, and we lose them because they don’t see that this is a place where they are going to be wanted or valued?” said Samantha Weeks, the first female solo pilot on the Air Force’s Thunderbirds demonstration flight team and a former member of the committee. “What does that do to our country?”

A seven-decade legacy

During World War II, some 400,000 women served in the military, in each branch’s women’s corps. In 1948, Harry Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which permitted women to join the military alongside men.

Three years later, then-Defense Secretary George Marshall established the committee to help him better recruit women into the military. In the nearly 75 years since, the committee has worked on everything from lifting the