For veteran Jennifer Hunt, the recent rehashing of women’s ability to serve in combat has been a distraction from the profound issues the Department of Defense has to deal with.
“It’s research, development, acquisition, the strategy of countering China and the pivot towards Asia,” said Hunt, a resident of Clarksburg. “It does a disservice to how important this job is to talk about this one narrow role.”
An Army sergeant first class and decorated veteran, Hunt says the debate harkens back to old and outdated ideas. As a member of the Individual Ready Reserve, Hunt says her views are her own and do not reflect those of the DOD.
“It’s just kind of surreal,” she says, to be “talking about ‘women in combat, can they do it?’ When, really, women have served in combat in like every war that America has had going back to the Revolutionary War.”
Lately, the subject of gender and the military is taking on new life. President-elect Donald Trump’s appointee to head the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, has questioned the wisdom of women in combat. In addition, the conservative Project 2025 plan on presidential transition raises the idea that people with “gender dysphoria” should not serve in the military.
The debate has lit up the network of women veterans, in Maryland and elsewhere. Maryland is home to roughly 348,000 veterans, about 15% of whom are women, according to 2023 Veterans Affairs data.
Anthony Woods, Maryland’s secretary of the Department of Veterans and Military Families, responded to the current debate by praising the contributions women have made in war.
“During both of my deployments to Iraq,” Woods told Capital News Service in an email, “I had the honor of serving alongside courageous women who navigated the same dangerous streets and undertook equally challenging missions, despite restrictions on their roles in combat.”
But that debate is likely only just beginning, as Trump moves toward putting his own mark on the Pentagon and every other federal agency. CNS interviewed several women veterans who worry about the fallout.
Lori Reynolds, a Baltimore native who spent three and a half decades in the Marine Corps before retiring at the rank of lieutenant general, says the question should be about the value women bring to the service.
While leading hundreds of Marines in Iraq and thousands in Afghanistan, Reynolds said she saw women make contributions in battle only they could make.
During her tour in southwest Afghanistan, Reynolds says, she saw well-trained, capable women riding in convoys and attaching to combat units to go all across the battlefield.
“They were able to do what men in particular couldn’t do,” said Reynolds. “They were allowed to talk to the Afghan women.”
That brought valuable intelligence to commanders in the U.S. military, she said.
But at that time women were still excluded from combat, as a 1994 Pentagon policy did not allow women in combat zones. The lines were blurred in the theaters of war, she said.
Also, combat is not just about using lethal force. Lethality, she said, you can find in any prison yard or in the streets of Baltimore. It’s also about values.
Reynolds says good, ethical military leadership is based on rules and trust, and it unites people to fight for the values of the American flag.
“Every time I put my uniform on,” said Reynolds, “I’m representing everyone who fought for this, and it has to matter. It has to mean something. If it doesn’t, it’s only about winning and losing.”
These values are particularly important to unify the country’s all-volunteer force, she said.
“Warfare is changing,” said Reynolds, “and you know what you really need representing all of America at the tactical level in time of need is all of America. You need what all of us bring to the fight.”
In 2013 the DOD released regulations that allowed qualified women to go to combat zones and even eventually enter combat roles.
Now that the roles seem to be up for discussion again, Reynolds argues it’s important to be specific about what exactly is under consideration.
There are all kinds of roles in combat. Currently, women can serve in the infantry at the very front lines and even in special forces, if they meet the standards.
Reynolds would like to see any DOD nominees explain exactly what they would like to see changed.
“I hope,” Reynolds said of Hegseth, “that his nomination hearings would draw this out of him in a very clear way.”
Women being able to serve in combat didn’t happen overnight. That’s evident at the Military Women’s Memorial in Arlington, Va.
The site is rich with evidence that highlights women’s contributions to the military from the Revolutionary War to today, including their participation in combat.
The memorial has built a database to register and tell the stories of women who served. They’ve registered about 308,500 so far, according to their website.
A senior advisor there, Marilla Cushman, ascribes the slow expansion of women participating in combat to the armed services needing women to help win wars.
“Why did women deploy to Europe in World War I,” she asked, “Because Pershing needed operators. During World War II, why did we bring women in? Because we needed that resource. We needed that talent, and kind of the same thing with Vietnam.”
Cushman said that with each war the U.S. fought in the 20th century, the need for women’s service led to new opportunities for them. The same happened during the first two decades of the 21st century because of the need for women in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Pentagon finally expanding combat options to women is part of Jennifer Hunt’s story.
During her time in Iraq, Hunt sustained shrapnel wounds to her face, neck and back after a vehicle she was riding in was struck by a roadside bomb. She says she was subsequently awarded a Purple Heart, an award given to those wounded or killed serving in battle. Her service and award were detailed in a lawsuit filed against the DOD in 2012 seeking to rescind a combat exclusion directive.
But the lawsuit didn’t go far.
In 2013, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta signed a memorandum that rescinded the exclusion policy and directed the forces to integrate women into newly opened positions by 2016. If forces wanted women to be excluded from particular roles, they would have to be narrowly tailored and based in evidence.
Today, Hunt said that during her free time, while she waits for nomination hearings, she’s pumping up her fellow women veterans who are talking about the issue.
The real issue for her is making sure whoever leads the DOD is the best person to lead the people who have served in uniform and the thousands of DOD civilians in Maryland.
She also said that Maryland residents have an important role to play here, because the DOD is a civilian-led institution. It’s up to them to write to their senators, she said.
“Anybody who thinks that because they’re a civilian, that they have no part in this, they have no voice,” she said, “no, you do.”
“You are a citizen of this country. You can have an opinion and a voice on it,” she said, “because it is also an opinion of what we want our society to be.”