Commentary by Kathleen McInnis

Published November 18, 2024

The incoming administration has plans to reshape the Pentagon's workforce. How it does so remains to be seen. But one fact is indisputable: women are making greater contributions to our fighting force than in any period in U.S. history. Just ask the last Trump administration. After all, then-president Donald Trump signed the bipartisan Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 into law and his administration authored the first Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) implementation strategy in 2019.

The Trump administration did so because supporting and retaining women in the armed services and national security institutions is neither superfluous nor "woke." Rather, not only do women comprise 17.5 percent of the active-duty force, including 19.7 percent of the active-duty officer corps, but women in the joint force actually afford the United States decisive military advantages. Such benefits are absolutely critical if the United States wants a military capable of taking on U.S. adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran. And make no mistake-in a strategic environment wherein China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are cooperating and learning from each other, the joint force needs every advantage it can get if the Trump administration intends to defend U.S. interests.

To start, the notion that the inclusion of women in the military has undermined the joint force's effectiveness is simply untrue. Officially or unofficially, since the Revolutionary War, women have always been part of U.S. war efforts. If effectiveness means winning, in the past hundred years, the United States has unambiguously won only three wars: World War I, World War II, and Operation Desert Storm (1991). Women were part of the team in those fights, contributing in every way they could. The reason that the United States has been in the business of losing its wars is that the U.S. national security establishment has not been able to build and execute effective war termination strategies in at least three decades. That's a major problem, of course, but one that's not going to be solved by alienating women from U.S. military service.

In fact, the track record shows that that women in uniform afford the United States and its partners critical military advantages. For long stretches of the war in Afghanistan, tactical military commanders (mostly men) engaged with local men to understand the local operating environment and build support for the Afghan government. However, local indigenous men on the ground did not always understand, or communicate, the root causes of local grievances. The joint force to its credit, figured out that there was a glaring hole in its intelligence picture and developed Female Engagement Teams-a group of volunteer female servicemembers who worked to establish trusting relationships with Afghan women-generally viewed as a successful program.

Lest the United States believe engagement with women was a requirement for Afghanistan exclusively, Ambassador Don Steinberg who brokered the Angola accords argues that their collapse was due to the fact that he failed to include women's perspectives in the negotiation. "In a very practical sense, even the ability to implement . . . agreements is dependent upon the ground truth that only women bring to the process." It is an admonition that the United States should take seriously as it wages "irregular" or "grey zone" warfare in hot spots around the globe. Without appreciating and acting upon local women's perspectives, the joint force risks missing key dimensions of the fights they are in.

Women's roles are not limited to intelligence gathering. Indeed, women have also been on the front lines making impactful contributions. In the fight to counter the Islamic State, women of the Syrian-Kurdish Women's Protection Units faced off directly with male fighters and, in the process, became viewed by some U.S. military commanders as strategic assets. For a radical Islamic State fighter, the prospect of being killed by a woman is especially mortifying, after all. Similarly, upwards of 60,000 women serve in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and are helping take the fight to Russian soldiers every day.

Want to win future wars? Women are only going to be more important. Battles of the future are unlikely to be decided by those who can carry a 60-pound rucksack for 15 miles. Physical prowess of this kind is not needed to operate a drone, repel barrages of missiles and drones, or develop algorithms needed to defend national infrastructure. Intelligence and operational acumen are. It is an obvious point but one that bears repeating: the United States can hardly afford to cut itself off from nearly 50 percent of its talent pool.

Being able to access all the talents in society is also critical when planning to deter adversaries and defend allies. Women's participation in Ukraine's whole-of-society resistance efforts helped block the military progress of Russia, an overwhelmingly powerful adversary. If winning wars is, at least in part, about preventing adversary operational gains and minimizing operational frictions, why not build a strategy that incorporates women as part of deterrence, resilience, and resistance strategies at the outset-and therefore help mitigate friction in wartime from day one?

The United States is, at the moment, trying to discern ways to better compete against the People's Republic of China (PRC). Despite the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s history of promoting gender equity (at least on paper), President Xi Jinping has decided that the CCP will now promote more "traditional" gender roles, including cultivating a culture of childbearing. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Xi does not pay much attention to programs like WPS-nor that his government tends to work with men when executing elite capture strategies in other third-party governments. Think about that: the PRC has just shy of half of the human terrain. Should not the United States, therefore, prioritize working with women and in the process build new competitive advantages against China?

So, what now?

There are a few things that the incoming Trump administration could do to retain the women in its national security workforce. Actions matter. The first, and perhaps most important, will be to retain the Department of Defense (DOD)'s current policies on women's access to reproductive health care in states that do not permit abortion. Service members have to go to where they are assigned. This is a pretty obvious point: the United States should not expect our service members-or their families-to risk their lives when posted to a base in a state with restrictive abortion laws.

Second, continue executing policies to reduce sexual harassment and assault, commonly referred to as SHARP. Yes, many complain that SHARP trainings are overly cumbersome-especially when there are millions of other tasks to do on a given day. But recall that sexual assault and harassment are about power and abuse. The intention of SHARP trainings, therefore, is to help ensure that units are not plagued by toxic personalities or abusive leaders-thereby enhancing effectiveness.

Finally, the DOD would be wise to consider women, and WPS tools as a strategic enabler for its operations, activities, and investments. There are any number of tactical and strategic advantages that doing so can afford the joint force, including developing strategic offsets relative to adversary force quantitative advantages and creating new ways to outflank China. Building and executing such strategies does not require large amounts of money, but rather by integrating WPS as part of its integrated campaigning strategies.

In the early post-World War II period, when Dwight Eisenhower was asked why women should be included in the armed forces, he responded: "Because we need them." What was true then is even more true now. The Trump administration must act quickly to prevent the erosion of this critical U.S. strategic advantage.

Kathleen J. McInnis is a senior fellow and director of the Smart Women, Smart Power Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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