Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth cut Pentagon funding for a program called “Women, Peace, and Security.”

This move sparked the usual outraged howls from the usual suspects, including “The Dispatch,” one of those fake conservative outlets that exists so Mitt Romney fanboys1 can whine about Donald Trump. The Dispatch, which claims 200,000 readers even though no one has ever heard of it2, decided to “fact-check” Hegseth’s announcement on the program cut.

The result proved – again – how lost the media and the diversity, equity and inclusion protectorate have become.

The Dispatch and others have made hay from this timeline, arguing that the first Trump Administration supported the law before naughty Pete Hegseth blew it up.

In reality, though, the Obama administration deserves most of the blame for this nonsense, I mean credit for this pathbreaking program. As a 2019 article explained, “the US issued its first National Action Plan for executing the Women, Peace and Security agenda in 2011… and this plan was most recently updated in 2016.” In other words, the 2017 law simply codified what the Obama-era Pentagon was already up to.

What was that, exactly?

As the Dispatch helpfully explained:

Congress tasked the DOD specifically with ensuring that various training regimens address “the importance of meaningful participation by women” and that employees receive training in “gender considerations”…

Let’s stop right there.

DOD stands for “Department of Defense,” last I checked. In more straightforward times, we called it the Department of War.3 I guess that was just too honest.

But changing the name didn’t change the job.

Our military still exists to fight wars. Our soldiers kill other human beings and occupy their land. Our pilots fly planes (and drones) that will kill other human beings and destroy the planes (and drones) trying to kill us. Our mechanics service the weapons that help our soldiers kill other human beings. Our engineers work to build the bases where the soldiers who kill the other human beings can live.

Et cetera, et cetera, you get it.

Worst-case, our military’s job is to kill human beings by the billions with the nuclear weapons we have all forgotten exist (they still exist).

This is a serious job.

(A VERY serious job)

It’s not just a serious job.

It’s a hard job. Yes, preparing to kill other people — especially when those other people want to kill you back, and doubly especially without killing too many civilians along the way — is a hard job.

That job is called warfighting.

I can’t believe this needs to be said, but it must: the military needs to focus on warfighting. And it must be allowed to plan and train for warfighting as it sees fit, under the broad guidance and direction of civilians who understand it. Not the micromanaging, the broad guidance and direction.

I can’t believe this needs to be said either, but apparently it must too: Men are stronger than women. Men are more reckless than women. Men are more violent than women. Men are less concerned with self-preservation than women. These traits are not admirable, they are merely real.

War is inevitably violent and dangerous and frequently depends on physical strength. So men are better warfighters than women.

The left thinks it can engineer away or simply ignore these realities in the same way that it has tried to engineer away or simply ignore the physical realities of relying too heavily on solar power for an electrical grid.

The risk of ignoring reality in the electric business is blackouts. The risk of ignoring reality in the war business is far worse.

(Great, great movie. And as real as it gets about Iraq. I know, I was there.)

On Oct. 31, 2023, the Biden Administration announced its “Release of the 2023 Women, Peace and Security Strategy and National Action Plan.” The top achievement the administration noted was that it had:

Promoted women’s meaningful participation and protection in the U.S. military. As Commander-in-Chief, President Biden has made it a top priority to eliminate obstacles to women’s military service…

Later, the report explained the administration had:

Institutionalized WPS expertise throughout the Department of Defense by investing in the Gender Advisory workforce… DoD is establishing a Gender Advisor workforce… to promote women’s meaningful participation in our own force and with partner nations.

And, as the Dispatch explained, apparently unironically, the Biden report “focused more on intersectionality—a core concept of identity politics… [and] also linked questions of women’s peace and security to climate change and LGBT+ rights.”

You might wonder what any of this has to do with warfighting.

The answer is nothing.

None of this nonsense costs very much (though collectively it costs more than you might think). That’s not the point. The point is that a “Gender Advisor workforce” is exactly what the military does NOT need.

But top-down civilian meddling on this issue, and in particular the pretense that women can be frontline warfighters, is deeply corrosive to an institution that depends at its core on the willingness of men to fight and die for each other.

None of this registers with the Dispatch, or NPR, or the Washington Post.

But it registers with Pete Hegseth.

And whatever other mistakes he’s made so far – and, yes, he’s made a few – kudos to him for stepping up and reminding the soldiers in his command what their job really is.