← Truth in the Barrel
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- [00:00]
A
22 senior military appointments and zero women. That is not a talking point. That is data. Today I'm joined by the researcher who's been tracking all of this and all of the changes affecting women in the United States military right now, Jessica Rutenberg, whose work has been cited in the New York Times. She's a former United States Air Force pilot. Jessica, thanks for joining us today.
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B
Yeah, thanks for having me, Amy.
- [00:28]
A
Before we dive in, both of us are more qualified than Pete Hegseth to do just about anything. Okay, I want people to know. Tell us about your background. How did you served in the Air Force? What did you do?
- [00:43]
B
I did. I served in the Air Force for a little over 20 years. My last job was in the Pentagon. I had multiple jobs, but I primarily was an Air Force pilot. Most of my flight time is in the KC135. I had over 3,000 hours in that as an instructor evaluator pilot. I served countless deployments to oif, OEF and other theaters around the world. And at the end of my career, I worked in the Pentagon and I worked on the National Defense Authorization Act. I coordinate with Congress to develop the budget for what some people call the palm, the five year budget that we talk about. And at the end of my career, I found myself in an interesting space where I could help others serve to the fullest potential. And I started volunteering on stuff such as the Women's Initiative Team team and removing barriers so that we could serve to our fullest potential. For me, that was like flying pregnant. I flew through three pregnancies, and I was able to influence and change some policy within the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and ultimately had to go to Congress and change some laws. So that's me in a nutshell.
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A
And for people that don't know, 3,000 hours in the KC135, which we in the fighter community and the Marine Corps affectionately called the Iron Maiden.
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B
That's a lot.
- [02:03]
A
That's a lot of hours. That's a lot of flight time. That's a lot of experience. So you bring a lot and then your Pentagon experience as well. Again, Pete Hegseth had never even been in the Pentagon before he was in charge of the Pentagon, which is quite a problem for us today. But you've been tracking the issues of women in the military almost real time. And before we dive into kind of the individual policies, I want folks to understand the big picture, okay? Women have been in the military for a long time. I'm not gonna go through the whole progression from the Revolutionary War. But basically, in the last half century, the progress for women in America's military has been somewhat slow but real. There was a time when the numbers of women were actually capped, that you couldn't only have more than. You couldn't have more than 1 or 2% of our military being women. There was a time when women could not be generals or admirals. Their rank was capped, that women could not be in combat positions. When I was a young girl, women could not do things like drive tanks or fly jets or any of that stuff. So the positions that mattered for promotion in the military, we're not able to be filled by women at those times. We've had times of change. In the 1980s, we opened the academies up. I'm wearing a Navy sweater right now for the Naval Academy, where I graduated in 1997. By the time I graduated, the academy has had women by that point for 15 years. And we. But we had a major giant leap. We had two major giant leaps, I'd say, in the. In the last 40 years. The first one was in the early 1990s under President Clinton, when ships and combat aircraft were open. Some ships, not all, but many combat ships in the Navy were open to women. And then another leap are in the Obama years, right around 2010 and 2015. And that is when submarines were open in the Navy and what they call ground combat positions, which was kind of the last bastion of all male units. And what am I talking about there? I'm talking about infantry, artillery, tanks, special operations. Those were kind of the last. And that brings us to today. And really, when I left the military, all the positions were open to women. And that was just a huge success story from my perspective, that that's all I ever wanted. Just open the positions, let women in. If they're qualified, they're qualified. If they're not, they're not. But what am I missing on the history piece?
- [05:15]
B
I think you nailed it on the head there. I do think there's one part that could fill in between, and that is the ability to become a parent. During that time, I felt like our hybrid generation between coming into the academy to what we had today is it's fine as long as you don't interrupt your service by having children. In the 70s, we disqualified individuals. We said, you are disqualified. You cannot stay in service if you become pregnant. And we had about five cases that women challenged being removed from service due to pregnancy. And eventually one of them stuck and they were able to overturn the policy, which is why we can serve today. But Then they changed the policy to say something such as women might find pregnancy and motherhood incompatible with service. So we still could volunteer separate. And that kept on going until that's kind of where I got into the Pentagon. And I didn't realize how much that impacted people's careers when they had biological children, especially on the parental part of the mother. That pregnancy discrimination wasn't recognized in the military until 2020. So you were. Yes, we had protections for, you know, doing a, B or C per career field if you were pregnant. But overall, if you were discriminated against for being pregnant, there was no protection for you like there was for gender and race and religion.
- [06:47]
A
Yeah, it's a really good point. And so it wasn't just the combat positions or the positions that were sort of advancing and opening up through this last 40 years, but there are other advances that women in the military have seen. You just named one also. The tackling of sexual assault in the military has, in my belief, advanced advances for healthcare for women in the military and women advancing in the ranks. And that's really important because those combat positions that I talked about and what you talked about, which is the pregnancy and some of these policies, allows women to stay in and advance in the ranks and take on positions that are general officer, admiral level. It takes 20 plus years to get there. So it's not like you just open up these jobs and the next day there's going to be women admirals and generals. And here we are 20, 30 years from the time some of this stuff has really changed. And, you know, you're starting to see women come into the higher ranks. But now we're here in 2026, and what do you see happening? How do you compare today's military and some of these advances that we've seen? Maybe when we left the military, we were at a better state than we are today. What's your assessment of just right now versus three or four years ago?
- [08:17]
B
Well, three or four years ago was right after I got out of military service. And I actually thought my advocacy wasn't needed anymore, that the women behind me, it was their turn to pick up the baton and just fine tune some small things that we needed to work on. But I quickly saw in the last couple of years that wasn't the case and that these individuals were no longer allowed to advocate for themselves within the institution, which is why a lot of veterans started speaking a little bit more vocally. And I will say, having been in the Air Force, not the Navy and the Marines, that I got to See what it was like to be led by women who were allowed to fly in combat. So if they were flying in combat in 1993, like Sharon Pressler for their first F16 pilot, and I saw people like General Van Ovos make all the way to four stars, and she wasn't allowed to be. She was like one of the last women that couldn't be a fighter pilot. She made it to the Pentagon at three stars, became an AMC commander, basically the highest level, the transcom commander. So I got to see when you remove those barriers, women not being capped at the senior leader jobs because you had to have this A, B and C background. Now women in ground combat, we don't really have them there until 2015. The laws changed a few years prior to that. So we have still a ways to go to see how this could impact the senior leaders. So let's just say you were a captain when this overturned. You're probably a lieutenant colonel now. You still have five, ten years before you go up for that. Look for fullbird colonel or for one star or for admiral. That's why policies like the submarines. In 2000, I think it was 10, I believe. Women and artillery, all this kind of stuff. I think you and I can both agree that you either qualified or you're not. It has nothing to do with gender. You either can do the job or you cannot do the job. I think holistically, America agrees with that. So why does that matter? It matters because women currently make up about 17, 18% of the total active duty armed forces. And quite frankly, we cannot keep up the capability, the readiness and the lethality that we have today without women. The majority of Americans are not qualified for service, whether it's medical, they're overweight, they're disqualified for legal problems in the background. We simply can't do it without women. And if you look at the recruiting numbers for the last few years, the army was making their recruiting numbers because women were more qualified in many cases, such as academics, and less likely to have legal problems in their background. So they made their numbers because of women. Quite frankly, we can't do it without them. Once you get women in the door, I want the most qualified individual flying an F35. I don't want it based on a gender or race. I want all the barriers removed and allow them to compete fairly. So I have the most qualified, capable individual at some of the most advanced aircraft.
- [11:16]
A
When I think of 17% women in the military and at the academies, that's like 30% women. At the Naval County, I feel like it really matters who does rise to the top. Yes, you want the best people. You have good, qualified people not getting promoted right now. And what Pete Hegseth is doing, and that's not only wrong, but it also matters because that 17% of our military, those many of them are the long ball hitters. You know, your sergeants, your corporals. You may have a woman in your unit who is the best at what she does. She may be the best one, she may be the best interpreter. Maybe she has language skills. Maybe she's the one that can hook up the radio the quickest. When you're out there and you know you're getting shot at and you need air support, you need somebody that can call for air support quickly. And that, that person, that soldier, that airman, whoever, that Marine, that person that does that job, the best may be a woman. And if she over time looks and says, there are no women in the high ranks, there are no women as command sergeant majors or generals or colonels, I don't see anybody progressing who looks like me. She is less likely to stay in. She is less likely to say, this is a place that I want to make a career. This is a place where I wanna continue to perform and serve my country. And that's why I feel like this is so important. A lot of people miss that. They look at. Well, there's, you know, Hegseth is not promoting women, and that's terrible. But there's qualified men going in those jobs. So it's not hurting our national security. No, it hurts our national security not only at the high ranks, but also all throughout the ranks. And you've tracked senior military appointments and promotions. So what does the data tell us about who's being promoted and who's not right now?
- [13:29]
B
Exactly. I think you make a huge point that it's not just the individual numbers, it's the culture, it is setting, it's the messaging. So pulling the data, I would like it to be more transparent to the public. But one of the things I see that comes with the culture is the removal of outward facing access to information. One of the first things that Hegseth did was shut down Dacwicz. The Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service. It was established right after women started coming in the 19 late 40s, when they had the Women Armed Services Integration act passed. And it was to assess and remove barriers for women in service and to help national security, national defense as we fully integrated. And this is actually what I would consider a very conservative group that Moves with slow progression, but they move steady forward. But Pete Hegseth called them a divisive feminist agenda and shut them down. And what they had was 75 years of data that addressed the senior leaders. There's a whole section because they have these reports and now you cannot find them publicly facing. So now you have to dig. And then you're looking at articles and you go to that article and that article is removed. You'll look at it, you go on the Internet and you're like, hey, I want to learn about the first female fighter pilots. And if it's not, if it's a DoD, a government website, it will say 404 not found, or you're going to have to put in a foia, which is a Freedom of Information act, which I have several in right now, and I'm still waiting to get six months later. So it's not ease of access. So I had to pull these numbers to get the data. The first thing I did was we have one full year of data. With Hegseth in the office, it takes a long time. There is a lot of lag to this. So we can't just say second month in office, the numbers went down because people have contracts, right? They can't just walk away like a civilian can. They have to wait until the term is up. So the reenlistments, if they're going to stay in for another four years. But this is what the senior leader did have said. The first senior leader, the 07 sets an admiral, a flag officer, a brigadier general in the army or in the Air Force that had a full round of nominations from the service, which we know a lot of people don't know, has to go through Senate, has to go to get recommended from the DoD, then it goes to the Senate, and then it gets confirmed and it goes to the White House. So there's a couple places where things get chopped. So just looking at the numbers compared to the overall percentages of women that are currently holding those positions at the 07 level, we have been reduced in one year by 45% of selection. 45%. Now, the sample size here, we're looking at just over 100. Just to be for all the math nerds out there, and I appreciate you keeping me on track, but that's why I had to wait so long. Because you look at Space Force, it's relatively small. Like one number can really skew it. And I get it. Maybe somebody should have been removed that, you know, that really shouldn't have been in that position. And that's my number one thing I hear when I present data is, well, we're just correcting the course for promoting people because they were women under the last administration. And I'm like, so you're telling me 45% of women performing at that level, that took them 25 years to get there, being in combat operations or the best personalists or the best A, B or c, we promoted 45% above board. And then we're going to hide the data that would prove or disprove those quote unquote theories. So when they say they lowered the standard, I say show me the data. Stop showing me social media clips on your Department of War websites. I mean, I've been going through, I'm going to go off on this. I've been going through the social media clips on Instagram and their Facebook sites and they very rarely show women on there, especially if they're going to be in a combat or a non supportive role. I'm not saying women don't exist on there. But the information that was in Dacoitz, when I have a lot of the reports downloaded before they took them down and avoiding the rest and fill in those gaps, was we don't show women in those roles and are recruiting. And that's another message that we're sending to 18 year olds that are considering service coming in right now, not just the ones that are currently serving that we're trying to retain.
- [17:56]
A
Yeah. You're not seeing a picture of a woman soldier driving a tank. You're not the 17 year old out there saying that I can do that. You're not seeing a picture of a woman flying a fire jet. It doesn't hit you the same way. I want to talk about standards just a little bit because this is what Secretary Hegseth has argued that these changes, and I guess him pulling the names of women and persons of color from the high ranks is somehow about restoring gender neutral standards, which is like his thing. But what people may not fully understand, and I think what Secretary Hegseth is exploiting, is that people don't understand that there are already gender neutral standards. The standard to fly a fighter jet onto to become a naval aviator in the fat community, you gotta land on an aircraft carrier at night.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
And guess what? Nobody else is in the cockpit with you.
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B
Nope.
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A
So that's the standard. That's one of the standards. And you know, to say somehow that the standards were lowered is complete bullshit. It's always been bullshit. And the fact is that the ground combat standards before we had women in these positions before. We didn't have any standards. There weren't any set standards. They had to make the standards, they had to codify them so that we could bring women in and have some kind of standard that was, by the way, gender neutral. But I want to get your take on this.
- [19:48]
B
I think it's extremely manipulative to frame things as the standards were lowered because the average person in the United States doesn't understand how the military works day to day. What I see is we have a fitness test that is not the same as a combat standard. A fitness test is your height and weight. What is, can you do push ups and sit ups? Is it health indicator? It is not a performance indicator for your career that you have chosen or been selected for. When I became a pilot, I had to do additional tests. I had to take a test to show that I could tolerate a certain amount of G. If my head weighs seven pounds sitting here, my head is going to weigh, you know, this, right? So if you're pulling seven GS and my head is seven pounds, it's now going to be 49 pounds when I do a turn. So I have to show that I have the physical strength. So I had to take a strength test. No one lowered those standards for me. It was gender neutral. And every check ride I've ever taken, you know, there is a standard, is black and white. You must land this many feet from centerline, this many knots, this length down the Runway. No one gave me an extra foot or an extra knot because of my gender. The aircraft does not care. Just like you said, the F18 on that carrier landing at night, the aircraft doesn't care. You either can do it or you cannot.
- [21:14]
A
I've always been somebody that just got so upset when Hegseth went off about the standards because he doesn't really know what he's talking about. And the other thing is, you know, the future of warfare is about drones. It is, it's a lot of technology. It's not going to be how many pull ups you can do. And you know, I saw this and I do think fitness is important. It's certainly important in the Marine Corps. There's, there's some, some validity to that. But what I saw, especially when I went to survival school, is that sometimes the guys, mostly guys who are the quote, fittest, based on the arbitrary tests that we give, okay, you can run three miles in sneakers, how fast, how many pull ups can you do, et cetera, how many sit ups, whatever the standard is after 48 hours of no
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B
food
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A
in survival school. Some of these guys couldn't tie their shoes.
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B
Oh, my gosh.
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A
And some people who you may not think would be the toughest or strongest, according to the sort of, you know, back home kind of tests that we would give, they excelled. And so my point is that I do think we have to look at what matters, but also what's important for the future. If we have a person who is the best drone operator who can put things together very, very quickly, get that drone in the air, save the day, and that person happens to be a woman, what are we doing? If we're making the military trying to take all women out of the higher ranks, the way Pete Hegseth is, what are we doing to our national security?
- [23:19]
B
We're definitely hurting it. When we look at stuff like the ground combat studies that Pete Hagseth, if you're not aware, this is very important, I think, for Americans to know that on December 18th, Pete Hagseth has said he signed a memo that he is going to review women in ground combat to see their effectiveness of the army and the Marine Corps. And that's roughly 4,500. Just that spec alone, it's probably closer to 5,000 when you throw in a few things from the Air Force and stuff like that. But when I look at that and I say, okay, what are you measuring? Is it. Are you measuring a push up? And how does that equate to being able to effectively do your job downrange? You know, so I want transparency and I want it to say why this task is so fundamentally important that you're going to measure it instead of measuring a woman. Don't measure women. Measure us all. And then if you need to break out the demographic to see if there is an issue, then we can talk about that. He says, we're going to do the study. December 18, he issues the memo. They begin. He gives some arbitrary things to measure that. I went through and reviewed the list. I'm not going to bother the listeners with that right now. Then we come up on that six month timeline and it's like, oh, we didn't do this right? We're going to have to issue it to another organization and give it another six months. I believe they gave it to John Hopkins. And that is where I want to see the statements of work, the legally binding stuff that should be available to the public, but is not right now. So we have put in multiple FOIA requests to have it. We just want, hey, if people are meeting the standards, the standard is the Standard. But what is the standard and how is it tied to the mission? And that needs to be in the document, the statement of work. And we're about nine months into that, 12 months. By the way, if someone were to want to overturn the policy to allow women the National Defense Authorization act requires justification to overturn the ground combat policy. Isn't that convenient that this study is coming out and it's not publicly available? I can see like, I think most people could see this in the service a mile away. And I think that first study, if I have no evidence, this is just, just Ruttenberg taking a gander. Okay. No evidence whatsoever, not tied to any organization, is. I don't think they were getting the outcomes they wanted in that first study.
- [25:52]
A
Yeah, it didn't show. It didn't show what they wanted. And they want some study that says that women aren't good enough and that. And so they can, you know, that that's, that's what they're doing. That's what they're doing right now.
- [26:08]
B
And this is what is so important about this. Because when we don't learn from our past, we're bound to make mistakes in the future, which is why we shouldn't be like, you know, hiding some of these stories so we can learn from them and move forward, forward more quickly. One of the things I Learned was the 2015 Marine Study for women in combat. That was done shortly after the policy change to allow women in ground combat, which by the way, a lot of them were doing it anyway. We just legalized it. We could talk about that some other time. But that study comes out and it was cherry picked. They only released an executive summary to Congress and didn't allow the full report to go public because if they did, then they would see that women were exceeding in several areas. But they omitted that from the report. But we love to reference that report. This marine study in 2015. This marine study in 2015. Which is why we need transparency on this quote, unquote review. I don't know if I would qualify as a study.
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A
Isn't the person that was in charge of that study in 2015, didn't they just hire that same person for this, for this latest study?
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B
You know, actually, I don't know. I don't have all the names because it's not. We have to look at. I will let you know. But that's why we are asking for full transparency. Any other government contract, unless it's like classified system, they should be readily available and talk about those kind of things. And the other.
- [27:35]
A
The other piece of that is why. I mean, there's no indication that we are less effective right now. And this is just Pete Hegseth's personal vendetta. So he hates women in the military. So women have advanced. We've done more than he's done. And he has to find a way to rid women in the military, particularly in the combat roles. So the first step of that is let's create a study which has some data in there. Whether it's bullshit or not, it's gonna be a bunch of lies that says that women make those units less effective. And therefore I can by taking women back to, I don't know, 1993. And we know this is true because Pete Hegseth said it in his book. He had no data behind it. He just doesn't like women in the military. You and I have more experience than he does in the military.
- [28:31]
B
I think, realistically, everybody in America realizes we need women. Now, how they do in the military, like, maybe some people think they should be in, but they should be support medical. But I think holistically, Americans agree. So if I wanted to get rid of the majority of women, the first thing I would do is get rid of the career fields. That gives them access to senior leader jobs, like you said, infantry, artillery, fighter aircraft, submarines, those kind of things. And then I would start cutting off the head of women that were coming in to 0607 level, since there wouldn't be any representation. So now you get rid of what's there, and now you get rid of the pipeline, and now you're left with just a few support fields. And by the way, the Air Force has always been led by a pilot, a personnelist, or a medical person is very, very unlikely to ever leave the military, because why would they? That's not their job. That's not their role.
- [29:29]
A
I feel like in many areas, just in the last few years, we're sort of going backwards. You talked about recruitment a little bit. We talked about the ground combat policies. You talked briefly at the beginning about pregnancy policies. Have they gone backwards as well right now?
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B
Not yet.
- [29:48]
A
So maybe that's. That's on the radar.
- [29:52]
B
I think that, first of all, we should do whatever it takes to protect that pregnancy is, you know, just a normal fact of life and that you should not be discriminated against for having children. And by the way, biological children as the female member, by the way, people love to fixate on that. Well, women, when they get pregnant, they can't deploy. When women get pregnant, they can't fly when women get pregnant. It's really funny that we fixate on pregnancy because if you look at the same data sets for men, men are less likely to be deployable because of administrative reasons for Article 15. And I'm not talking about numbers. Even if you increase the number of women and we all got pregnant, men would still be less qualified to deploy because they're more likely to get hurt in a major injury by doing something
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A
motorcycle accident related to their job.
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B
And they're more likely to be sitting there in the system for 12 months waiting for an Article 15 to process. So it's funny, we focus in on that piece, we're like, oh, well, pregnancy is going to destroy our ability to do combat. No, I think there's a lot of other factors and that you can't just pick. But one thing that's a pet peeve for me is that I flew all three of my children pregnant. And the policies there were still based on like a 1960s chicken egg study. And I found that we could open the aperture and most of us wanted to lean in. We were hungry to fly. We wanted those hours because we found out that it's almost, or in most cases just as safe to fly an aircraft stateside in peacetime than it is just as safe than driving that same car to go to that mission to fly. Sometimes it's more dangerous statistically when we looked at it, and not everybody is in Top Gun going to Iran, dropping bombs. That's 1% of our mission at the time. Most of the time we can keep up our currencies or we could free up other pilots to go downrange. We just had these archaic policies and thoughts about when women become parents, they become burdens onto the unit.
- [32:01]
A
I saw this in my own career. And it's also an issue of retention because we spend millions of dollars to train, for example, a pilot or somebody else to get to a position that's really important, that we need that soldier, that airman. And when I, when I was in the Marine Corps flying, I didn't see any women of high rank generals in the Marine Corps who were married, who had children, who were active duty.
- [32:43]
B
Bingo.
- [32:43]
A
There were, there were maybe a couple colonels, those are exceptions, who were reservists, who had children, but there weren't any. And I see that, you know, and women see that. And, you know, you're in your 30s and you're rocking it. You're one of the best in your squadron. You know, you're. I'm not saying suggesting I was. But there are women out there that were. That are. I mean, Nicole Malachowski, superstar. You know, there are. And I flew with them. And I know that, you know, there are women out there that are amazing, and they see that and they're like, I can't get there from here. I can't. I can do all of the Top Gun. I can do all of these things. But we just, we didn't. That was. That was the cultural piece of the military that I feel like we really needed to work on was that having children, being able to. The pregnancy policies and still have your career because you invest so much in these folks.
- [33:55]
B
Absolutely. There was a Rand study that looked at the retention rate of female compared to male pilots because of the value of their training, anywhere from 1 million to 12 million, depending on which aircraft they flew. And we found that women were about 22% less likely to be retained. And the number one reason was their ability have their own children. And not that adoption or anything else is less honorable, but the physical act of having the children. There was no system in place for them to allow them to take even a few months off without being penalized. I don't know about you, but I think anybody who wanted to have physical children of our generation, it's like, okay, time it. There's this one assignment that you're going to get that's probably going to be staffed between flying assignments. And you try your best. If that's going to be when you're having a child, you try to squeeze one in there. And if you can't, well, like, then you start having this guilt of getting grounded. And by the way, you didn't need to be grounded, but you were grounded instantly because we didn't put the study, the time, or any of the research in there. And we went to the airlines and found out a lot of this civilian equivalent, like the tanker I flew, it's basically a Boeing 707. And we found, like, yeah, people are flying all the way up to seven months pregnant. They have a healthy pregnancy. So we're just. Actually, it has nothing to do with women. Like, why would you take that many women away from flying? We found 400 women a year in the military were flying that were pregnant, and if you just gave half of them the opportunity to continue flying half of the time, we would have the equivalent of 32 pilots in a pilot crisis that could be flying lines at home. So it's a readiness issue, and it costs nothing to just open that aperture. And yet it just, it makes good
- [35:43]
A
Business sense right now with everything that's going on. See, folks have to understand these were the types of issues that we still needed to work on even three or four years ago. And we were prior to the second Trump administration and we were working on it and I feel like we were moving in the right direction. We had, we had opened up the jobs, we were starting to really tackle sexual assault. We were, you know, as a cultural thing, we were trying moving in the right direction with a lot of these things. And then in comes Trump 2.0 and Pete Hegseth and I feel like all of that progress has just halted and now we're, now we're just hanging on to try to keep our positions, you
- [36:29]
B
know, holding the line. And I think the damage has already been done. How much damage it depends to the American people who they elect and who they put in into the office coming up elections. But the damage is done. It feels like we've gone back 10, 15 years. So it's like women like you mean other amazing veterans that are in these organizations and nonprofits that are going to the Hill, going to senators and representatives office and proposing stuff like the War act and National Defense authorization to try to hold on to what we have as long as we can.
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A
So tell us about some of these organizations and what they do and why they're so important.
- [37:12]
B
The one I joined right away was the Women in the Service Coalition. It's led by Sue Fulton and Chris Fear is amazing as far as helping women in the army going through Ranger school. I joined them because a lot of women were getting shut down like Dachowitz internal organizations to the Department of Defense, they were getting shut down and then we had no place to go. So we tried to find organizations to come together and tackle the larger issue. Policies that were going to impact women 10, 20 years from now. So do we. Are we annoyed that the Naval Academy is making them chop their hair? Yes, but you can grow your hair back. We're going for the big rocks like keeping sexual assault, making sure those policies like women feel safe and men to be able to report sexual assault in a system that they believe in, the EO system, that they believe in the IG system, that they can have the potential to get promoted, that they will have a job in that career field. Because if I were a major right now and as a woman in the army and artillery, I would be scared poopless that I had spent my first 10 years in a career field and I might not be in it in a year from now. And those are the things that we focus on. So we go to offices like Representative Houlihan, she was in the Air Force. We try to introduce things like the warrior act that didn't pass to protect. Like, hey, if you're at the very least going to have to be transparent in your policy to the American people and justify it. So we do a lot of data driven evidence and we partner with a lot of people. Like we'll come together and share knowledge with the aclu, the Women's Law Center. I think I said that correctly. Swann will go other organizations and we'll share that information. For me, my passion is, you know, policy when it comes to ground combat and flying combat. So I went to risky route because that's definitely the organization to go with when you want to talk about women in ground combat. Right now.
- [39:07]
A
Yeah.
- [39:08]
B
So WHISKEY stands for Women in the service Coalition, Inc.
- [39:13]
A
Awesome. And I love it that it's whiskey because this is truth in the barrel. And we're talking. We talk whiskey all the time. That's great. So what are you watching most closely over the coming months?
- [39:30]
B
The report, number one for me right now and the projects that I've been handed, not that saying it's the number one project is the outcome to the study that's going to be coming out. John Hopkins with women in Ground Combat effectiveness. I want that report. I want to be able to mull it over and I want it to be publicly available so that it can't be cherry picked for that. Number two, I would say it's the culture when it comes to sexual assault. IG and eo, those are the main reporting channels and there's reasons. So IG stand for inspector General. So if there's someone was breaking a policy that was more of how we do our mission that was illegal, that you'd be able to report it and that they would investigate it. EO is a separate beast. It's called equal opportunity. That's where we have protected classes such as gender, race, religion, so that you can practice the stuff without it impacting your career. So you have a system to say, hey, they didn't hire me because A, B and C go to EO and say, they didn't hire me because I was black versus not a white male, and they can investigate that. And then sexual assault has a special program so that you can report it and make a decision whether you want to be public or private for a later decision. Because that's a very emotional decision to make. But you want to preserve evidence and that goes outside the chain of command so that it doesn't get reported directly through the chain necessarily, so that there's protecting the victim so that they can make better decisions later. I feel like most women I talk to, and I want to reiterate that there are many men that get sexually assaulted too, by other men, and some women do sexually assault men, that their confidence in the system is shaken, and even if they report it and they win, they feel like there's going to be retribution. And you see that like in Pete Hegseth when he had the September brief with all the generals he brought in. He was complaining at the EEO system, the IG system. It leaned towards like, hey, mission first, but don't worry about the people as long as we can get it expedited. And that's a problem when you want to go fast is. I mean, what evidence does it say that slowing down a little bit and doing some letting commander do a little bit of research is going to hurt the mission? And I think if you look at Pete Hegseth and you've read his book and you know a little bit about Pete Hegseth, I don't know if I can say this on a podcast. I think he's a little butthurt what happened to his unit back in Afghanistan and Iraq and the whole AOR kind of thing of what happened to his unit and his perceptions of women. And it's pretty obvious to me when I say, okay, you know, Lisa Hester got, you know, the same, you know, award that he did, but she got, you know, with valor, and he didn't get with valor, but she was shot at, and he might not have been shot at. And now he's like, oh, well, sde and I. Well, no, you know, her convoy got attacked and, you know, she held the line even though she wasn't supposed to be there. Again, another example of women in combat that before it was allowed to be in combat. When you deploy women down range, they're going to be at arms. Like, look at Iran right now. I mean, there's a good. I haven't written the numbers up to date, but a third of the members killed have been women.
- [42:56]
A
Well, 18 U.S. troops have been killed in connection with the war in Iran, and five of those service members were women.
- [43:03]
B
Right? And we're looking at the 135 that crashed. There was two women on that. There was two women in the last one that came through. And then there were. You said five. It sounds about right to me based on the numbers. But the initial one that Came out when it kicked off. I know there was at least one or two in there.
- [43:22]
A
Yeah, it's real. I mean, I want to end here by just asking you to kind of summarize. Why should Americans who don't serve in the military care about all of these kind of. I don't want to call them in the weeds changes. They're very personal and very important to you and me because we sort of lived it. But why should Americans care about these policies right now? And why should. Yeah, I'll just leave it at that.
- [43:58]
B
Great question. I think first that the United States military is always reflected the values and the demographics of American society we recruit from. I think we're an early indicator of what could happen in the future if we leave small details that go unchecked. Because something that happens that seems small now might have ripple effects 10 years from now that we don't see, they're going to be much larger. And then two, who wants to have a military that is political? We've always been apolitical. And I think I've never. I've never flown with another pilot and looked to my left or right, depending on the seat I was at, and wondered if they were a Democrat or Republican, because that, quite frankly, I didn't care. All I cared is that individual had my back. So when we let politics creep into the military like this, we have a divisiveness within our own culture. Now, I haven't seen it, but I think it's going to start when we're like, well, oh, no, this person's on my crew. And it's going to impact our performance. And when it impacts performance, then it makes our military less lethal. And without that, we're not going to be the most effective military in the world.
- [45:11]
A
I'm going to be tracking this stuff. I'm not going to let Pete Hegseth just ruin the military. We got to continue to talk about it. We got to continue to highlight it. Those women who are in the service right now deserve for us to be on the outside raising the bullshit flag on all of this stuff. I'm just telling you they deserve it. Because when we were in, we had the benefit of progress. It was slow, but it was happening. And I feel like right now they are really. Women in the military are really being targeted, particularly at the higher ranks, by Pete Hegseth and his minions. And we need people to stick up for them. We need the American people to not sit by and just watch this happen, but say, this is a bunch of bullshit and these women deserve the same opportunities and the same progression as their male counterparts. And when you're pooling, you know that going from captain to admiral and there's six admirals and you take out half of them and they all happen to be women or persons of color, we need to step up and say what's going on here? Okay. That's what I'm just saying.
- [46:38]
B
Or at least prove that incompetence was there. But no, zero evidence has been presented.
- [46:45]
A
Yeah, 100%. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for joining us for bringing this sort of real research, this data that you have to this conversation. I appreciate the work you're doing and hopefully this won't be the last time you come talk with us on Truth in the Barrel. I really appreciate it.
- [47:04]
B
Thanks, Amy.
- [47:06]
A
Yeah. And thank you to everyone who is listening. If you'd enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe to leave a review and we'll see you next time on Truth in the Devil's Cunt.
- [47:17]
B
It.