I served in the U.S. Army Special Operations Command on a Cultural Support Team embedded with elite combat units. From this vantage point, I can state with absolute certainty that women do not belong in U.S. military combat units.

Today it has become a perverse badge of progress to claim that equality demands women shoulder the same burdens of war as men, even at the cost of life, limb, and sight. The feminist project seeks full parity within all combat ranks of the U.S. military, the latest effort in a decade-long push for formal gender integration.

But this misguided egalitarianism reflects not progress but a profound cultural regression. Unfortunately, the military has become yet another battleground for the cultural revolution, where the truths of human nature are denied in service of ideological dogma.

The recent nomination of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense has reignited this debate. Hegseth, unlike most generals and policymakers today, understands that combat roles demand capabilities and cultural cohesion that women cannot provide. For his honesty, he has been met with predictable outrage, as contemporary gender ideology admits no dissent. In 2024, to question a woman’s “right” to fight and die on a battlefield is to invite condemnation as a bigot. This is the twisted truth of modern feminism: celebrating a woman’s ability to die in foreign wars over her capacity to build families and communities at home.

Culture, as always, is downstream from politics. Before President Obama lifted the combat exclusion policy in 2014, extensive studies demonstrated what common sense already knew: mixed-gender combat units performed worse under stress, suffered diminished cohesion, and struggled with retention. But the Obama Administration’s ideologically driven Pentagon leadership ignored these realities. Today, the studies are buried, but the consequences of this cultural experiment are visible in the degraded morale and performance of our most essential fighting units.

Even many conservatives have fallen into the trap of framing this issue as one of “meritocracy.” They argue that any individual, regardless of sex, should be allowed to serve in combat roles so long as they meet the requisite standards. This framing, while superficially appealing, fails to grasp the deeper implications. The U.S. Army itself undermines this meritocratic myth with its separate fitness standards for men and women. To earn a top score on the Army Combat Fitness Test, a man must complete 84 push-ups in two minutes, while a woman is required to complete only 42. These disparities, which exist across physical evaluations, reveal the biological differences that feminists refuse to acknowledge but war will never overlook.

This willingness to discard male-only spaces in the name of equality is not limited to the military. Consider Representative Nancy Mace, who became the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, formerly a male-only military institution, in 1999. Her accomplishment was hailed as a triumph of feminism and heralded the end of that institution’s unique identity. Today, Mace champions the preservation of female-only bathrooms on Capitol Hill, a stark contradiction that exposes the inconsistency of her stance. Male-only spaces, from military academies to combat units, are fair game for destruction in the name of progress, but female-only spaces must remain sacrosanct. This hypocrisy underscores the broader incoherence of the feminist agenda, which prioritizes equality only when it suits its ideological goals.

Yet the problem is not merely physical or political. Combat requires not only physical excellence but cultural unity. By forcing women into combat roles, we sever the military from its traditional identity as an institution set apart from civilian ideologies.

My sons may grow up in a world without Boy Scouts or all-male sports teams, but if there is one institution that should remain untouched by this ideological madness, it is the U.S. military. If the U.S. wants to maintain its status as a respected world power, the military must remain a domain governed by biological and cultural realities, not the fictions of gender theorists.

In the coming months, critics of these policies will face predictable attacks from the Left. Senators like Tammy Duckworth, herself a combat veteran, will invoke their service and sacrifice to silence dissent. Duckworth’s injuries, tragic as they are, underscore the perversity of this feminist project: it is not a triumph of equality that led her to lose her legs in a misguided war—it is a tragedy of ideology prevailing over reality.

Americans should resist these appeals and reassert the principle that war is, and always has been, a burden for men alone to bear. Women should reclaim their indispensable role as the cornerstone of strong families and communities—institutions that give meaning to the sacrifices made on the battlefield.