Under Joe Biden, nothing was a greater threat to our military than the administration in charge of it. With a brief respite during Donald Trump’s first term, America’s fighting force has spent the better part of the last 15 years as a minefield of social experimentation — with little to show for it but low morale, retention and recruitment woes, and a global reputation of weakness and wokeness. In the name of “equity,” the Biden and Obama administrations made a mockery of the military’s high standards. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, that ends now.

Say what you will about Hegseth’s personal life, his choice of tattoos, or his inadvisable group chats, but when it comes to making our men and women in uniform respectable, this veteran is on a one-man mission to turn our troops back into an elite warrior class. After years of relaxing standards, the Pentagon announced it was returning the military to the high physical benchmarks that made our men and women the most lethal fighting force in the world.

“For far too long,” Hegseth insisted on X, “we have allowed standards to slip. We’ve had different standards for men/women serving in combat arms [military occupational specialty’s] and jobs. … That’s not acceptable, and it changes right now!” The time has come to ditch the Left’s DEI approach to national security. “We need to have the same standards — male or female — in our combat roles to ensure our men and women who are under our leaders and in those formations have the best possible leaders and the highest possible standards that are not based at all on your sex.”

As part of a memo released Monday, the DOD secretary directed the secretaries of America’s military departments to “develop comprehensive plans to distinguish combat arms occupations from non-combat arms occupations. This effort will ensure that our standards are clear, mission-focused, and reflective of the unique physical demands placed on our Service members in various roles.” For certain combat roles, Hegseth continued, “it is essential to identify which positions require heightened entry-level and sustained physical fitness. These roles, which are critical to our military’s mission success, demand exceptional physical capabilities, and the standards for them must reflect that rigor.”

From now on, the secretary declared, “All entry-level and sustained physical fitness requirements within combat arms positions must be sex-neutral, based solely on the operational demands of the occupation and the readiness needed to confront any adversary.” Those standards, he directed, must be implemented by October.

As Hegseth himself explained, this isn’t meant to denigrate or shame female recruits. But the reality is, men and women are physiologically different, and females should never be allowed in combat units if they aren’t physically up to the task. And according to a study by the left-leaning RAND in 2022, the Army’s women were not — failing even the easier fitness tests at significantly higher rates than men. That was the same year the Biden administration decided to loosen certain requirements for women against the advice of experts, who warned that it would only create a more dangerous environment for everyone.

Hegseth took a lot of flak in the days leading up to his confirmation hearing for suggesting that women shouldn’t be in combat roles at all — a position that he’s modified with this caveat: “If we have the right standard and women meet that standard, roger, let’s go.”

When the last two Democratic presidents decided to dilute fitness tests for females, Family Research Council’s Lt. General (Ret.) Jerry Boykin was adamantly opposed — not just to their DEI approach to our national defense but to mixing the genders to begin with. Boykin, who’s commanded Special Forces in battle, was clear about the consequences of this kind of social experimentation. “Some units, like infantry, Special Forces, SEALs, and others, are not suitable for combining men and women. It has nothing to do with the courage or even capabilities of women. It is all about two things: the burden on small unit leaders and the lack of privacy in these units,” he explained.

“Leaders of these units must be focused like a laser on keeping their soldiers alive and defeating the enemy,” Boykin knows. “It is unreasonable to encumber them with the additional burden of worrying about how they provide privacy for the few women under their command during stressful and very dangerous operations. It is not the same as being a combat pilot who returns to an operating base or an aircraft carrier after the fight, where separate facilities are available.” It’s the absolute wrong policy for America, Boykin went on, because it “ignores fundamental biological differences between the sexes and the natural implications of those differences.”

And it’s not just men who feel this way, but brave women in uniform too. The New York Times pointed to an op-ed written by Kristen Griest, one of the first two females to graduate from the Army’s elite Ranger School, objecting to this woke approach to war-fighting. “With equal opportunity comes equal responsibility,” Griest insisted. “Lowering fitness standards to accommodate women will hurt the Army — and women.”

She argued that separate scoring based on gender would “drastically reduce the performance and effectiveness of combat arms units. … [T]he requirements to join the nation’s combat forces could soon be as low as performing ten push-ups in two minutes, running two miles in twenty-one minutes, deadlifting 140 pounds three times, and performing only one repetition of a leg tuck or, failing that, two minutes of a plank exercise,” she pointed out.

“While these low standards may have seemed adequate in a controlled study,” Griest insisted, “I know from experience that they will not suffice in reality. Indeed, the presence of just a handful of individuals who cannot run two miles faster than twenty-one minutes has the potential to derail a training exercise,” she warned, “not to mention an actual combat patrol. … Missions will be delayed and other soldiers will be overburdened with the weight of their unfit teammates’ equipment. This scenario is inconvenient and bad for morale during a training exercise; in combat it could be deadly.”

Griest stressed that “while it may be difficult for a 120-pound woman to lift or drag 250 pounds, the Army cannot artificially absolve women of that responsibility; it may still exist on the battlefield.” And frankly, “The entire purpose of creating a gender-neutral test was to acknowledge the reality that each job has objective physical standards to which all soldiers should be held, regardless of gender. The intent was not to ensure that women and men will have an equal likelihood of meeting those standards. Rather,” she argued, “it is incumbent upon women who volunteer for the combat arms profession to ensure they are fully capable and qualified for it. To not require women to meet equal standards in combat arms will not only undermine their credibility, but also place those women, their teammates, and the mission at risk.”

What Hegseth has done is recognize that men and women are different, Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Bob Maginnis told The Washington Stand. “Yet, across recent and mostly Democrat administrations, those differences were blurred to the point of insanity. As a result, the military departments watered down their standards for many combat positions to access women. However, as most combatants understand, that reduction in standards negatively impacted readiness. That’s the target of Hegseth’s directive — improve readiness.”

Maginnis, who wrote an entire book called “Deadly Consequences: How Cowards Are Pushing Women into Combat,” blames Obama for starting this social experiment, which, he noted, coincided with that administration’s announcement to assign women to ground combat units. “That decision to violate a virtually universal principle of military practice represented our craven military leadership’s surrender to the political forces of radical feminism. The implications for U.S. national security were — and remain — sobering.”

Now, years later, Maginnis points out, “We know that a) very few military women are interested in combat duty; b) the Pentagon’s assurances that military readiness will not be compromised are seriously flawed; and 3) until Trump, our top uniformed leadership surrendered to feminist ideologues without a fight.”

As far as he’s concerned, this change “was a long time coming.” And it should be welcomed by every “common-sense American interested in maintaining a ready military.”